Americans on Facts and Opinions

[Rev. Rye]

ISTR, it's the fourteenth amendment which forced the matter. Nope. My bad. Wrong case.

The 14th Amendment explicitly applies to "All persons born or naturalized in the United States." If they're considered here illegally, they haven't been naturalized. I'm sure we do have protections to immigrants (legal and illegal), but I don't think they're explicitly in the Constitution. At best, they're a result of Supreme Court decisions, which, as I mentioned earlier, are as much down to the pre-existing biases and prejudices (for good or for bad) of the judges themselves as they are to the Constitution. Like it or not, the Supreme Court's interpretations of the Constitution hinge on exactly that: interpretations.

This is why a judge from Detroit in the 19th century who probably didn't have much experience about the realities of racial segregation can say it's not necessary unconstitutional, and a judge in the 20th who has seen the results of racial injustice firsthand (and perpetrated it, until he actually looked into what he was doing and grew a conscience) can look at the same system of segregation and say "No, segregation is inherently unconstitutional."

They had the same document (and the seven amendments passed in the 60 year interim weren't relevant to the case at hand, hell, one explicitly undid another), and they reached two very different conclusions.