Thread by @ThomasHCrown

"We have a moral duty to aid the weak and the oppressed." Compelling.

"We have no right to control our own borders if the right age-and-sex mix appears there." Self-evidently stupid and counterproductive.

Arguments are not won purely on merit, but on the manner in which they're proposed and argued.

This is especially true with matters in which the moving party seeks to have our laws, if not suspended, then at least highly-charitably enforced and interpreted: If you want to make a case that our immigration law as it exists is immoral, you can't simply hand-wave at it.

As it happens, I think the 1986 amnesty was a terrible idea, not so much for the amnesty as for the price paid: It created a far more rigid system surrounding our borders, which our governing class never intended to enforce, and which therefore undermined the rule of law.

It tied legal impermeability to two borders that had historically been fairly permeable; and when the permeability continued (and increased), the refusal to enforce those laws divided Americans over the very idea of the law being America's approach to an issue.

Thus, a caravan full of women and children who, let us be frank, are both fleeing real problems and being used as a political weapon against the Trump administration, necessarily divides Americans of good will and leads to mutual allegations of bad faith.

Dishonesty and relentless buck-passing in our governance is both a symptom and a cause of the decay of our society and our system of government; but no one is willing to pay the costs to stop it, and so it continues and worsens.

This leads to Trump and Bernie Sanders and dozens of others who should never be part of the governing mix on moral and practical grounds alone: Americans no longer see our government as shared self-governance, but as a weapon/shield to be cynically used against the others.

There is a lot of ruin in a nation, but we used up a lot of it.