Our broken immigration system is subverting the rule of law

Here’s how to fix it.

By Lorraine Smith Pangle

The rule of law, democracy’s first requirement, is under strain in America. Living under law means there are rules that we all accept, that apply equally to everyone, that embody a sacred compact. Following these rules, we will be protected. Breaking them, we are liable to punishment. Entrusted with enforcing them, we must do so fairly and faithfully, of course using discretion to prioritize the clearest and most egregious cases, but never using laws as weapons against rivals and never conspiring to subvert or ignore them.

So obvious are these principles that we almost forgot for a time to think about them. So imperfectly are they observed everywhere, so adept are healthy republics at withstanding small breaches of them, that we became cavalier about them until the breaches became a flood. But when such floods are not dammed, social trust dies and republics fall.

Americans of all stripes have been conspiring, largely in silence and for a long time, to subvert the rule of law on immigration. Progressives pushing for open borders and establishing sanctuary cities were only the visible spearhead of this conspiracy. Behind them were legions of employers—farmers, factory owners, contractors, small businessmen, and ordinary citizens in search of gardeners, maids, and babysitters—whose appetite for affordable labor created the magnet that drew the millions of illegal immigrants who came. Bringing up the rear was the Republican party’s cynical refusal to agree on a solution, lest it surrender a weapon that has indeed proved useful in elections.

This conspiracy against our own immigration laws and now a lawless effort to counter it are tearing our country apart. The borders are closed but the struggle has moved into the American heartland and into cities like Los Angeles that harbor concentrations of illegal immigrants and a hostility to ICE enforcement. When immigrants are arrested leaving courthouses where they have dutifully appeared for hearings, when students with visas are targeted for deportation based on their views, and when legal residents are sent to foreign prisons without hearings, the rule of law begins tearing more visibly. When citizens protest these actions and troops are mustered against them over the objections of mayors and governors, democracy’s guardrails take a direct hit. A majority of Americans were tired of out-of-control immigration, but they did not vote for this.

The Democratic Party is right to complain about these harsh and unconstitutional tactics, but it compounds its own complicity in this deepening disaster if it only complains. Leaders who want to keep our republic must muster the courage to say “enough” to all of our evasions of the rule of law around immigration, with a positive, practical plan — a plan that would bring nearly all of the 11 million undocumented immigrants we’ve surreptitiously welcomed to come work for us, as well as their employers, into conformity with the law once and for all.

Amnesties without effective border controls and employer enforcement do nothing to curb future illegal immigration, as the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 showed. The border must be guarded and new violators caught and returned. Employers must accept responsibility for verifying their employees’ status, in exchange for a promise that current workers will not be swept up en masse.

Those already in the country must be given a short window to register and become “documented non-citizens,” with a temporary right to work and a date for a hearing. As long as they can prove that they were present in the country before the law went into effect and they are not found to have committed serious crimes, they should be given permanent resident status. This need not include a pathway to citizenship, at least not now. We can call the new status a “blue card” and save the citizenship discussion for another day.

After tempers have cooled and trust is restored, we can better make the case for generosity to these men and women who have become our neighbors and fellow workers, just as we can more constructively discuss how to resume legal immigration, as we should. But first we need laws that work, laws that have a chance of bringing us back together.

This article originally appeared in the Austin American-Statesman on 29 June 2025.

Lorraine Pangle is a government professor at the University of Texas, where she is co-director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Study of Core Texts and Ideas and chair of the Committee of Counsel on Academic Freedom and Responsibility.