Illegal immigrants enter into this country in a state of abstracted legal, but less immediately actual, peril. The odds that an illegal immigrant will be deported once he or she makes it into the interior of the country are vanishingly small, but there is still a chance – saying “you can (probably) stay” is different from saying “you can certainly stay.” That chance of deportation encourages the illegal immigrant to stay away from the orderly course of the law and thereby strengthens the hands of exploitative law-breaking employers, human traffickers, gangs, and the other predators who prowl the shadows of our immigration system.

But what also strengthens the hands of these predators is the legal vacuum created by the current immigration regime. A rigorous enforcement of immigration law would also go after the unscrupulous employers and gang members and traffickers, but the current indifference to law provides these types with shadows within which they can operate. Imagine what child labor would be like in a United States where it was technically illegal but, in practice, it was allowed or even encouraged and subsidized on a massive scale. Child workers would be more likely to be open to abuse and neglect in that situation than in a situation either where child labor was totally allowed or where laws against child labor were rigorously enforced. It is no surprise that, in the contemporary United States, violations of child-labor laws also go hand in hand with illegal immigration: The abuses enabled by indifference to illegal immigration facilitate other abuses and law-breaking.

Under the present administration, we seem to be tending in the direction of a compounding of these shadows. Over the past few months, illegal immigration has gone from a long-simmering problem to an increasingly acute public crisis. Recent polling by Gallup suggests that nearly 20 percent of Americans view immigration as the top problem the U.S. faces. For an administration infamous for its casual and extensive exercise of executive powers, immigration exemplifies the wild reach of executive whim, as the president has seemingly arrogated to himself the power to rewrite immigration law at will.