Logical Flaws Analysis: Immigration Laws and Policies
As has been seen in the recent debate regarding the issue of the separation of children of immigrants from their parents at the border, immigration is a fraught issue in America. America is a nation built, in part, upon immigration. Many individuals who have immigrated to America illegally form the backbone of a number of industries in the US, spanning from the restaurant industry to the landscaping and gardening industry as well as domestic service. Yet there have been repeated calls to curtail illegal immigration, making immigration reform policies very difficult to pass. One approach which has been adopted by the previous Obama Administration, in the face of Congress’ unwillingness to pass meaningful immigration reform, is “prosecutorial discretion,” according to Delahunty& Yoo (2013), which means selective enforcement of the law.
Delahunty& Yoo (2013) use the Obama Administration’s attitude towards immigration as a greater example of what the authors see as the Democratic administration’s hypocrisy in regards to executive overreach. The article “The Obama Administration’s Nonenforcement of Immigration Laws, the DREAM Act, and the Take Care Clause” from the Texas Law Review makes an extended argument by analogy, suggesting that Obama’s criticism of the Bush Administration for, among other acts, the Iraq War, was self-serving given that Obama did not enforce laws he disagreed with, such as the removal provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).
Argument by analogy is one of the most common techniques used in persuasion. It is, however, a very problematic one, given that there are seldom perfectly analogous situations in historical fact, in contrast to analogies made between words. Even if there are superficial similarities between the historical circumstances being analogically compared, that does...
For example, in the case of the Obama versus Bush analogy, President Bush was later found to have misrepresented key aspects of intelligence to the US Congress, such as the existence of weapons of mass destruction, to encourage it to enter into a military conflict with Iraq. In the case of the Obama Administration, there was no fundamental misrepresentation of its failure to or concealment of its enforcement of aspects of the law.
Delahunty & Yoo (2013) accuse the former Administration of embarking upon an open borders policy, stating that “if a President can refuse to enforce a federal law against a class of 800,000 to 1.76 million individuals, what discernible limits are there to prosecutorial discretion” (p.2). As well as making a false analogy, however, this also seems excessively hyperbolic. The Obama Administration did not forgo the enforcement of all reasonable immigration policy, as this sweeping claim seems to suggest but rather had argued that specific types of immigrants who had come into the country illegally might be worthy of certain protections. According to the nonpartisan Anti-Defamation League, an organization dedicated to fighting bias against Jewish people and other marginalized groups, “the DREAM Act (short for Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act) was a bill in Congress that would have granted legal status to certain undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children and went to school here” (“What is the DREAM Act,” 2018).
In other words, the Act which the authors accuse President Obama of enforcing in actual fact, even if Congress did not enact a formal policy change, was not designed to improve the fact of all immigrant groups, but those who had been brought to the United States as young children. Many Dreamers might not even be aware of their status as…
