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This doesn’t make sense to me. Aren’t all laws then “administrative categories”, of those who commit or don’t commit the corresponding crimes? Breaking the law

This doesn’t make sense to me. Aren’t all laws then “administrative categories”, of those who commit or don’t commit the corresponding crimes? Breaking the law means, per definition, that someone has committed an illegal action. Calling someone an “illegal immigrant” is appropriate when the crime is immigration related.

trhway 7y ago
when criminality under a given law starts to show significant correlations with an ethnicity/nationality/race/gender/orientation/etc. - i.e. with the characteristics acquired by birth, not by choice - it gives rise to the reasonable doubt whether the law (or its application) is just or whether it is just an oppressive tool against a specific class of people.
- oh_sigh 7y ago
  Yes, I was thinking the same thing, about how laws against murdering disproportionately affect men. Surely there is reasonable doubt that the law is just our matriarchal society doing testes-policing.
- tristor 7y ago
  That does not necessarily follow. Geography is highly ethnically divided, generally speaking, and globalism is a new phenomenon. The fact that US immigration laws predominantly affect Hispanic people in a negative way is not racist, it's because we share a land border which nearly only has Hispanic people on the other side of it to the tip of the continent and beyond. Where you have to have a concern is about ENFORCEMENT. Because the laws applied equally to a white Canadian sneaking across the border as they do to a Mexican sneaking across the border, but one is more likely to receive enforcement action than the other. But it's important to understand the distinction between enforcement and legislation. Both should be addressed, but it's silly to throw the baby out with the bathwater and fail to understand the mechanism of action.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- corporate_shi11 7y ago
  That ignores the plain fact that certain "groups" commit certain crimes more than others, which is often a source of "group" correlation with crime and punishment. Assuming oppression is usually just the result of a superficial reading of the data.
- caseysoftware 7y ago
  > "when criminality under a given law starts to show significant correlations with an ethnicity/nationality/race/gender/orientation/etc." Yes, immigration law - both application and enforcement - tends to correlate highly with nationality. I'd wager speeding tickets also correlate with drivers. What should it correlate with?
  - throwawaysea 7y ago
    If application and enforcement correlates with nationality because those violating the law are more likely to be of a given nationality, then I don’t think that is a problem. But I think enforcing the law to a different degree against similar violations of distant nationalities wouldn’t be fair. That is, if 10 Canadians and 10 Mexicans crossed into the US illegally, and all faced similar consequences, I think that’s fine. If there are only 1 Canadian and 10 Mexican violators and this causes limited border patrols to be distributed proportionally between the US-Canada and US-Mexico border, I think that’s still fine. But if 10 violating Canadians and 10 violating Mexicans who were all apprehended faced different consequences, that would not be fair.
pjc50 7y ago
Well, in "common law" jurisdictions the common law is supposed to consist of all those things that are traditionally regarded as wrong, as distinct from "statute law" which has been explicitly defined. They are considered different sources of law by legal scholars. And as far as I'm aware immigration has never been considered part of common law. French law has a similar kind of droit administrativ / droit naturel distinction. More importantly, immigration is particularly prone to the law changing under you, so even if you have complied entirely up to that point, you may become "illegal" despite not having done anything, and it may not be possible to regularise your situation.
anigbrowl 7y ago
You can be in administrative violation of a statute without being criminally liable. This distinction matters a lot in law because in the former case any litigation is a civil, not criminal matter. As an everyday example, suppose you park carelessly and get a lot of parking tickets and then don't pay them. You could run into all sorts of problems and eventually your car might be towed away and sold but generally you can't be arrested over it (unless you have a habit of illegally parking in disability spaces, also please don't treat this as a legal opinion), and your history of illegal parking won't show up on a criminal background check. This maters a lot because people who are anti-immigration love presenting all illegal immigrants as criminals and use that to justify all sorts of human rights violations with 'but they're criminals!!!' Even the immigration violations that are crimes (like illegally crossing a border after having previously being deported) are misdemeanor-type crimes, but to listen to some political types you'd think it was worse than murder. Bear in mind too that such misleading rhetoric is used to justify private as well as public atrocities, such as the shooting in El Paso earlier this year where 22 people were murdered.
- throwawaysea 7y ago
  To be honest, this seems like hand wringing about the degree of consequence for a given law-breaking act. It isn’t unfair to label someone who parks illegally an “illegal parker”. I understand that law may distinguish between different violations and establish terminologies (like “misdemeanor”) to classify them into categories and enable discussion around them and affix penalties based on those categories. But all these violations are in breach of the law and therefore illegal. If they weren’t illegal there wouldn’t be grounds for any consequence, after all. So I still don’t see why people are averse to the term “illegal immigrant”. It seems accurate to me. The rest of what you point out - like people equating an illegal border crossing with murder - seems like an orthogonal discussion.
  - anigbrowl 7y ago
    Nobody was complaining about the term 'illegal immigrant'. My post was about the common misconception that everyone covered by that is a criminal, a misconception which the grandparent comment made twice. If you had paid attention to the context perhaps you would have saved yourself the effort of making a throwaway account to add a moot point.

trhway 7y ago

when criminality under a given law starts to show significant correlations with an ethnicity/nationality/race/gender/orientation/etc. - i.e. with the characteristics acquired by birth, not by choice - it gives rise to the reasonable doubt whether the law (or its application) is just or whether it is just an oppressive tool against a specific class of people.

oh_sigh 7y ago
Yes, I was thinking the same thing, about how laws against murdering disproportionately affect men. Surely there is reasonable doubt that the law is just our matriarchal society doing testes-policing.
tristor 7y ago
That does not necessarily follow. Geography is highly ethnically divided, generally speaking, and globalism is a new phenomenon. The fact that US immigration laws predominantly affect Hispanic people in a negative way is not racist, it's because we share a land border which nearly only has Hispanic people on the other side of it to the tip of the continent and beyond. Where you have to have a concern is about ENFORCEMENT. Because the laws applied equally to a white Canadian sneaking across the border as they do to a Mexican sneaking across the border, but one is more likely to receive enforcement action than the other. But it's important to understand the distinction between enforcement and legislation. Both should be addressed, but it's silly to throw the baby out with the bathwater and fail to understand the mechanism of action.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
corporate_shi11 7y ago
That ignores the plain fact that certain "groups" commit certain crimes more than others, which is often a source of "group" correlation with crime and punishment. Assuming oppression is usually just the result of a superficial reading of the data.
caseysoftware 7y ago
> "when criminality under a given law starts to show significant correlations with an ethnicity/nationality/race/gender/orientation/etc." Yes, immigration law - both application and enforcement - tends to correlate highly with nationality. I'd wager speeding tickets also correlate with drivers. What should it correlate with?
- throwawaysea 7y ago
  If application and enforcement correlates with nationality because those violating the law are more likely to be of a given nationality, then I don’t think that is a problem. But I think enforcing the law to a different degree against similar violations of distant nationalities wouldn’t be fair. That is, if 10 Canadians and 10 Mexicans crossed into the US illegally, and all faced similar consequences, I think that’s fine. If there are only 1 Canadian and 10 Mexican violators and this causes limited border patrols to be distributed proportionally between the US-Canada and US-Mexico border, I think that’s still fine. But if 10 violating Canadians and 10 violating Mexicans who were all apprehended faced different consequences, that would not be fair.

pjc50 7y ago

Well, in "common law" jurisdictions the common law is supposed to consist of all those things that are traditionally regarded as wrong, as distinct from "statute law" which has been explicitly defined. They are considered different sources of law by legal scholars. And as far as I'm aware immigration has never been considered part of common law. French law has a similar kind of droit administrativ / droit naturel distinction. More importantly, immigration is particularly prone to the law changing under you, so even if you have complied entirely up to that point, you may become "illegal" despite not having done anything, and it may not be possible to regularise your situation.

anigbrowl 7y ago

You can be in administrative violation of a statute without being criminally liable. This distinction matters a lot in law because in the former case any litigation is a civil, not criminal matter. As an everyday example, suppose you park carelessly and get a lot of parking tickets and then don't pay them. You could run into all sorts of problems and eventually your car might be towed away and sold but generally you can't be arrested over it (unless you have a habit of illegally parking in disability spaces, also please don't treat this as a legal opinion), and your history of illegal parking won't show up on a criminal background check. This maters a lot because people who are anti-immigration love presenting all illegal immigrants as criminals and use that to justify all sorts of human rights violations with 'but they're criminals!!!' Even the immigration violations that are crimes (like illegally crossing a border after having previously being deported) are misdemeanor-type crimes, but to listen to some political types you'd think it was worse than murder. Bear in mind too that such misleading rhetoric is used to justify private as well as public atrocities, such as the shooting in El Paso earlier this year where 22 people were murdered.

throwawaysea 7y ago
To be honest, this seems like hand wringing about the degree of consequence for a given law-breaking act. It isn’t unfair to label someone who parks illegally an “illegal parker”. I understand that law may distinguish between different violations and establish terminologies (like “misdemeanor”) to classify them into categories and enable discussion around them and affix penalties based on those categories. But all these violations are in breach of the law and therefore illegal. If they weren’t illegal there wouldn’t be grounds for any consequence, after all. So I still don’t see why people are averse to the term “illegal immigrant”. It seems accurate to me. The rest of what you point out - like people equating an illegal border crossing with murder - seems like an orthogonal discussion.
- anigbrowl 7y ago
  Nobody was complaining about the term 'illegal immigrant'. My post was about the common misconception that everyone covered by that is a criminal, a misconception which the grandparent comment made twice. If you had paid attention to the context perhaps you would have saved yourself the effort of making a throwaway account to add a moot point.