Presumptively Unconstitutional: Why Pre-1965 Laws Shouldn’t Rule a Post-Civil Rights Nation

🔍 DETAILED BREAKDOWN:

🏛️ 1. The Core Premise: Question the Legitimacy of Laws Made During Apartheid

“Every law passed before the 1965 Voting Rights Act should be presumptively unconstitutional…”

This argument flips conventional constitutional interpretation on its head.

Premise: If a law was passed before the Voting Rights Act of 1965—during a time when millions of Americans were legally disenfranchised—then that law was created by a government that did not represent its full population.

In essence:
➡️ If the system was undemocratic, the laws it produced should be treated with deep suspicion.
That includes everything from civil codes to criminal statutes and especially immigration law.

🧑🏽‍⚖️ 2. Law and White Supremacy: The Immigration Act as a Case Study

“The Congress said in real time that they needed the law to prevent the quote ‘mongrelization of the white race.’”

The author unearths a stated, documented, undeniable motive:
The 1924 Immigration Act (and its later updates) was explicitly about preserving white racial purity—rooted in eugenics, xenophobia, and anti-Black/anti-Asian ideology.

This is not speculative. It’s in the record. Lawmakers made their racial intent clear.

So the question becomes:
🧨 Why are we still enforcing that law in 2025?
🧨 Why are people still being arrested, deported, and denied rights based on legislation born out of white supremacy?

🧊 3. The Cold Logic of Bureaucratic Cruelty

“We’re putting people in jail for the crime of existing.”

The speaker exposes the cruelty baked into our legal system, especially around immigration. We’ve criminalized:

Human presence
Misfiled paperwork
Missed deadlines
Visa overstays

All of it built on a framework never designed to accommodate the full humanity of nonwhite, non-European migrants.

And that cruelty isn’t incidental—it’s by design. The old system wanted barriers. Wanted exclusions. Wanted to define “American” as white and Western.

⚖️ 4. Civil vs. Criminal: A Necessary Legal Shift

“Criminal immigration status offenses should not be criminal offenses—they should be civil.”

This is a radical but entirely reasonable legal argument.

People shouldn’t lose their families, jobs, or lives for technical errors in immigration paperwork.
➡️ This isn’t drug trafficking. It’s paperwork.
➡️ This isn’t a threat to national security. It’s a mother trying to stay with her kids.

By redefining immigration violations as civil, not criminal, we humanize the process—and stop handing out lifelong consequences for bureaucratic mistakes.

💔 5. The Moral Crisis of Persuasion in a Failing Democracy

“I cannot convince people to open their hearts… treating people with humanity is a controversial position.”

This is one of the most haunting lines in the entire piece. It speaks to the emotional exhaustion of advocacy in a nation where decency has become debatable.

The speaker isn’t just grappling with policy. They’re wrestling with:

Apathy
Nationalistic fear
The failure of moral imagination

In a country that’s “failing,” the speaker acknowledges: You may not care. You may not change. But the law can—and must.

🔚 6. Conclusion: A Legal Reckoning Is Long Overdue

“Why should I give a damn about some law that some old white man passed in the 1920s?”

That’s not just rhetorical fire. It’s a call to reexamine what we honor, what we enforce, and what we call “justice.”

The laws we inherit reflect the values of the people who wrote them. If those people believed in racial purity, disenfranchisement, and exclusion—then those laws don’t belong in a truly democratic future.

🧠 IN SUMMARY:

This is not just an opinion. It’s a framework for constitutional rethinking.

The Big Idea:
➡️ If laws were written under racial apartheid, they are fundamentally illegitimate in a multiracial democracy.
➡️ If laws still cause harm based on those origins, they must be repealed, rewritten, or rendered obsolete.