Following the law is the only sensible way to address the illegal immigration mess

If you think way back to 2023, you may remember that this city was suffering a crisis of illegal immigration.

Caused by people being bused to the city from Southern states that then shared a wide-open border with Mexico.

New York had declared itself a “sanctuary city,” so people like Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas reckoned that states like this one should be the ones doing the heavy lifting.

Texas hadn’t asked to have millions of illegal migrants walking into their state.

But if places like New York were going to pose as heroic, liberal places, then perhaps we should do the work — including housing these people.

It didn’t take long for New York lawmakers to discover the gap between moral preening and reality.

After hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants arrived in this city and the authorities started taking over whole hotels to put the new arrivals up, even the highest officials realized there was a problem.

You may remember that at one point, former Mayor Eric Adams said the migrant crisis threatened to “destroy New York.”

At the height of all of this in 2023, there were many cockamamie proposals for how the city might cope.

One idea — proposed and swiftly dropped — was that New Yorkers might be incentivized to take migrants into our own homes and put them up ourselves.

What could possibly go wrong?

Novel themes ring true

As it happens, I have just finished reading an excellent new book — “A Better Life” — by the novelist Lionel Shriver, which imagines what might have happened had that scheme actually been adopted.

In her novel, Shriver (most famous for “We Need to Talk About Kevin”) focuses on the family of a 62-year-old liberal divorcee who lives in an upscale area of New York with her 26-year old son.

When New York calls for people to join in its “Big Apple, Big Heart” program, Gloria Bonaventura wants to be first in line.

She manages to take in a young Honduran woman called Martine Salgado, and the novel unwinds from there.

By taking in her Honduran, our liberal heroine believes she is helping to save the world.

But her son ends up becoming a stranger in his own house, while Martine has her own views about America.

“USA no only for Americans,” she says.

“USA for every people.”

Soon Martine is joined by someone who she claims is her brother.

Soon the “brother” starts to bring in his friends.

I won’t give away the whole plot.

But Shriver is such a good writer that you can both imagine where things are going and not be able to predict how they are going to get there.

Or how badly things are going to go.

But the questions the book raises are the same ones this country is still struggling through.

Is the hard-working but illegal Martine a “better American” than Gloria’s unproductive, overeducated but layabout son?

Who actually deserves to be in America?

Can America be the home for anyone in the world who wants to move here?

As Tom Homan announces the draw-down of ICE operations in Minnesota this week, all of this becomes even more prescient.

In recent weeks, we have seen the sort of issues raised in Shriver’s novel play out again in real time.

On the one hand, it is true that America is a big-hearted nation, and has been more successful than any other in history in absorbing people from all over the planet.

But Americans also believe in fairness.

And they know that people who break the rules are different from people who follow them.

Or at least they used to know that.

Left’s hill to die on

But listen to the radical leftists who have been objecting to any and all ICE operations in recent months and you will see the blurring of what used to be one of the most important divides of all: the difference between legal and illegal.

That difference being the law.

The law is not a small thing to try to erase.

Just as it shouldn’t be a small thing that radical leftists keep encouraging ordinary citizens to come out and prevent ICE from detaining and deporting child-rapists, murderers and others.

Since when did the liberty of all Americans depend on ensuring that a convicted rapist who is in the US illegally should have the right to remain here unmolested by law enforcement?

That’s a hell of a hill to die on.

But like the fictional Gloria Bonaventura, it is a hill some Americans seem literally willing to die on.

So how do we get out of this?

One thing is to recognize a very important fact.

If you leave the borders open — as the Biden administration did — you incentivize law-breaking.

And you leave untold problems for your successors to deal with.

The last administration set up a huge problem and its supporters now criticize all efforts to address it.

But why shouldn’t there be more criticism of people who caused the mess than there is for the people who are trying to clean it up?

Why shouldn’t the people who flooded this country with illegals be the ones who are protested — peacefully — by people who care about this country?

Why should there be no price for stress-testing a country but only hostility for the people who are trying to address that mess?

As we approach the midterms, some polling suggests that the Republicans could get a battering for the cleanup operation that President Trump promised he would do.

Follow the law

There is one simple answer to this — which is where I started.

Which is to hold onto the law.

It is unbelievably difficult to legally immigrate to this country.

And perhaps that is how it should be.

But if we reward those who break the rules, we also undermine those who follow them and do things the right way.

Anyone interested in actual justice should think about that.

And remember that however big our hearts might be, we still need to keep our heads about us, too.