Constitutional protections apply to all people on US soil
Don't listen to anyone who tells you that non-citizens are not entitled to Constitutional protections.
And fear not, this is not becoming a political blog. As always, I limit my critique to bullshit in pop culture: facts vs falsehoods, science vs pseudoscience, reality vs fantasy. This AI meme graphic, and the falsehood it claims, are definitely bullshit in pop culture; and it demands correction.
This was posted by a Facebook page called Tea Party. Its obvious implication is that people without legal status are not entitled to the Constitutional protections granted in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments:
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime… without due process of law.
No State shall… deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Well, what’s a “person” here? Is it anybody at all, or is it exclusively a natural born citizen? This was the question before the Supreme Court in Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886). Yick Wo was one of hundreds of Chinese owned laundries in San Francisco. Hopkins, the sheriff, refused to renew the business licenses of all Chinese owned laundries. Yick Wo argued that this violated the equal protection clause. In its landmark opinion, the Court found:
The guarantees of protection contained in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution extend to all persons within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States, without regard to differences of race, of color, or of nationality.
This was made into law in §1977 of the Revised Statutes:
…All persons within the jurisdiction of the United States shall have the same right in every State and Territory to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, give evidence, and to the full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of persons and property as is enjoyed by white citizens and shall be subject to like punishment, pains, penalties, taxes, licenses, and exactions of every kind, and to no other.
That’s right, people do not need to have citizenship — not even legal status of any kind — to still be able to sue you, and win, and have the courts enforce any damages you might owe them.
If this sounds outrageous to you, consider that it is one of the things that elevates the United States above nations like Russia or North Korea, where the state can simply declare you guilty, and do anything to anyone without due process. Freedoms are not freedoms if they are withheld from some; rights are not rights unless they apply to all. That’s the difference between a right and a privilege. If you want real rights and real freedoms, they must apply to everyone or else they don’t really apply to anyone.
A corollary insinuation in this silly AI meme is that people stealing from Walmart are more likely to lack legal status. I wondered if this is really true, given the fact that undocumented immigrants commit only 38% as many crimes as native born US citizens.
Published research does indeed find that Walmart is the biggest shoplifting victim, but arrest reports don’t include citizenship status; so this claim is difficult to verify. But we can get close. A 2014 study looked at shoplifting in general among a representative sample of 43,000 adults, and included nativity, the closest proxy available. The strongest predictors of likelihood to shoplift are — with apologies to the Tea Party meme enthusiasts — a history of psychosocial impairment and mental health service use. Here is the statistic of interest: what percentage of shoplifters were:
Born in the United States: 94.93%
Born in a foreign country: 5.07%
According to the US Census, 14-16% of people living in the US, regardless of status, were born in a foreign country. Thus, the data show that the foreign born shoplift at about ⅓ the rate of native born citizens.
If the Tea Party Facebook page wishes to justify its racism and/or xenophobia, looks like they’re going to have to turn to something other than facts to do it with.
Just Fyi, speaking as a former refugee resettlement worker and ESL teacher, a field that I miss working in BTW, Walmart has an amazing history, at least locally, of hiring recently arrived people often with limited English. In fact, I have been told by people assisting refugees with job placement that Walmart's #1 priority with hiring refugees has been availability, not English or other skills. Sadly, we will have to see how Walmart copes without low paid, newly arrived refugee labor. Gee. Walmart prices might even increase. Imagine
I am confused by the comment: "This was made into law in §1977 of the Revised Statutes". That passage comes from the Civil Rights Act of 1866, specifically what is now codified as Section 1, later incorporated into 42 U.S.C. §1981.