Immigration and the Underground Railroad

All analogies always break. Analogies are comparisons of two things that are not perfectly alike, otherwise they'd be the same thing being compared to itself. This being the case, at some point you'll find at least one place where the things are not alike. The question is whether the breaking point of the analogy comes before or after the analogy has borne the weight you wanted it to bear rhetorically. 

To say that something is analogical is to say that it has a sort of proportion to the other thing; they are shaped, in other words, in similar ways. Two unlike things can be analogical to the same object: a baseball diamond and a playing card diamond, for example. Indeed, two opposed things can both be analogical to the same object. In this case, Federal immigration enforcement is being analogized to slave patrols or Nazi Jew-hunters. It is just as legitimate to analogize the illegal immigration system to slavery, in which case the Federal immigration enforcement is... well, you'll see, because I'm going to spell out both analogies after the jump.

Analogy the First: Federal Immigration Enforcement are like Confederate Slave Patrols or Nazis

On this analogy, the proportion comes where there is a class of people (slaves, Jews, immigrants) trying to get somewhere they want to be (the North, America, America) and a class of armed agents of the state trying to stop them and force them to go back where they don't want to be (the plantation, Nazi concentration camps, their home countries). Resistance (the Underground Railroad, people hiding Jews, judges conspiring to defy law enforcement) is said to be heroic because it is helping the victim class against the armed agents of the state. 

Now it is worth noting that in all of these cases the place being sought is not entirely desirable. Slaves who escaped to freedom in the North were still ruthlessly exploited, now in factories rather than on plantations. Conditions for unskilled factory labor in the 19th century were horrifying by contemporary standards. Injuries were very common due to unsafe working conditions, and if you got hurt you were just unlucky because there were no protections for workplace injuries. There was intense racism in the North too, different but not necessarily better than what was experienced in the South. For Jews coming to America generations later, migration was to better working conditions due to the success of organized labor in that same interval, but it was still a difficult place to be with hard work, relative poverty, and antisemitism. 

That is a point of successful analogy for Analogy the First. Migrant laborers who come to America are paid near-starvation wages for harder work, and work that generally lacks the workplace protection laws that govern American employee/employer relations. Because they are here illegally and subject to deportation, such migrants cannot appeal to the law or the courts for justice when they are mistreated. Among themselves they can appeal to the cartels (as the earlier migrants from Italy did to La Costa Nostra), but in return they are subject to criminal abuse and taxation by the cartel bosses. 

In all three cases, the victim class is trying to escape an evil even worse than the evils they are escaping to, and thus are willingly choosing the lesser evil for themselves. The armed agents of the state are trying to enforce the worse evil upon them in order to keep them in their designated victim class.

So it's not an unreasonable analogy, provided that we recognize the breaking point. The migrants are not being pressed into slavery, nor in danger of being sent to execution camps; they are being returned home, where mostly they are free citizens. Some of course are criminals, and home means going to prison. Those are of course criminals here as well: the law is against them both at home and abroad. The may be less happy in their home country, especially if they are imprisoned, but this is quite different from being pressed into chattel slavery or a concentration camp.

Analogy the Second: Illegal Immigration as Analog to Slavery 

To return to the first analogy's discussion of working conditions: "Migrant laborers who come to America are paid near-starvation wages for harder work, and work that generally lacks the workplace protection laws that govern American employee/employer relations. Because they are here illegally and subject to deportation, such migrants cannot appeal to the law or the courts for justice when they are mistreated. Among themselves they can appeal to the cartels (as the earlier migrants from Italy did to La Costa Nostra), but in return they are subject to criminal abuse and taxation by the cartel bosses." 

Here the employers who exploit the illegal immigrant laborers are analogous to the plantation owners who used slave labor. While they are not forcing them into chattel slavery (point of disanalogy) they are reducing them to an unfree class by taking advantage of their inability to go to the law for protection. This allows for corrupt exploitation by the employers (many of these are indeed plantations in the strict sense, but now owned by corporations instead of an individual or family). 

On this analogy, Federal immigration law enforcement is playing a role that is still similar to the slave patrols, but only in the sense that they exist to serve as part of the terror that keeps the migrants unfree to go to the law. They are never enforcing the law well enough to substantially reduce illegal migration, as that would not serve the interest of the owners class that has political power via its wealth (here as in the antebellum South). Rather, they exist to do just enough scary raids and enforcement to terrify the subject population so that they will keep their heads down and not complain nor agitate for better conditions. 

The analogy to the Confederate South still works, but the one to the Nazis does not. You have to admit on this model that the Nazi project was nothing like the Confederate project, which was merely exploitative and extractive rather than genocidal. 

Yet there remain a few breaking points, as identified above, because all analogies always break. 

Non-analogically, several have noted that the criminal being helped to escape by Judge Dugan was in her court to answer domestic violence charges. The analogy to an escaping slave looks a lot worse when you factor that in: this was not just some member of an amorphous 'victim class,' but someone who had in fact harmed others whom she was helping evade punishment. 

Since she was the very judge assigned to that case, the actual victims' justice was her business. Failure to mind your business is a violation of a non-analogical ethical principle. Pursuing analogical "justice" over actual justice isn't a bad candidate for such a violation either.