Monday, November 28, 2016

Statement By The AAUP On "Sanctuary Campuses"

link
   I still say it's none of their business. I still say it's liberal co-opting of an organization that ought to be politically neutral...I'm still not happy about it...but I have to admit, the recommendations are perhaps more defensible than I'd expected:
While colleges and universities must obey the law, administrations must make all efforts to guarantee the privacy of immigrant students and pledge not to grant access to information that might reveal their immigration status unless so ordered by a court of law. Nor should colleges and universities gather information about the citizenship or immigration status of people who have interactions with the administration, including with campus police. College and university police should not themselves participate in any efforts to enforce immigration laws, which are under federal jurisdiction. Faculty members should join efforts to resist all attempts to intimidate or inappropriately investigate undocumented students or to deny them their full rights to due process and a fair hearing.
   Well, now that I paste it in, I guess it is pretty bad. 
   I don't see any justification for any of these asserted "musts." Even if immigration laws are a federal matter, is local law enforcement ever expected, with respect to any other crime, to ignore even blatant violations of the law? Or is immigration yet again being treated as a special case?
   I understand recommending that people not go out of their way to bust a law-abiding student who has lived his whole life here. But it makes no sense to me whatsoever to assert that it is never permissible for any university official to report even the most egregious violations of this particular type of law. 
   Again, I don't see how such a position is defensible except in light of a premise to the effect that immigration laws are inherently illegitimate. And that is an open borders position.
   Seems to me that universities ought to treat immigration law like they do any other law--whatever that might mean. Immigration law is not a special case in this respect. It's only the liberal bias of academia that can explain this special treatment.

2 Comments:

Blogger The Mystic said...

The position could be that OUR immigration laws are illegitimate, thereby sidestepping the open borders concern.

I think you're basically off with the open borders thing. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I think many of the people making the typical logical errors of conflating illegal immigration with all immigration, or beholden to PC nonsense, or what-have-you, are likely arguing for positions whose logical consequence would be some sort of (virtual/pseudo/actual) open borders policy, but none of them have thought this out to that extent.

My guess: If you asked any of these people if they supported open borders, they'd reflexively say "no" (assuming they understood the question).

This stuff just isn't that well thought out, and you don't see anyone overtly pushing for an open borders stance, so I really, really doubt anyone's trying to sneak one in. They just don't know wtf they're talking about and they feel bad about bad things happening to innocent illegal immigrant children.

And that latter thing is reasonable. The response to it is not. But if that's the case, don't expect that their irrationality is so well-developed that they have hidden super-secret open borders agendas.

3:11 PM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

Yeah, I don't actually mean so much that there's a secret agenda--more like: their position seems to presuppose or entail a pro-open-borders position.

But also:
I predict there *will* be a significant push for open borders in my lifetime. IMO it's the nature of the left. They'll just keep moving further and further in that direction.

Also, *I've* seen openly open-borders stuff--not much of it, but I've seen stuff about it on PHILOS-L.

Certainly lefty philosophers are chattering about it:

http://www.jstor.org/stable/1407506?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

Here's something:

http://democracyjournal.org/arguments/an-opening-for-open-borders/

Here's something:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/02/open-borders_n_5737722.html

Something else:

http://time.com/4062074/migrants-open-borders/

Of course you can find someone advocating anything on the intertubes...but I'd bet money that this is going to be a thing.

6:14 PM  

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