I’m no lawyer, but I find very plausible William Galston’s argument in today’s Journal that the New-Deal-era Administrative Procedure Act purports to delegate to the executive branch sufficient authority for Obama to amnesty five million illegal immigrants – even granting them rights that legal immigrants don’t have.

As the title on Galston’s article says, “The Law Is With Obama on Immigration.”

To which I respond with the words of the noted legal philosopher Dirty Harry: “Then the law’s crazy.”

The out-of-control delegation of unaccountable authority to the administrative state is not a defense; it is the problem here.

I’d like to see high levels of legal immigration, but the rule of law is more important. Permitting high immigration legally says we are self-confident and hopeful, and view human beings as an asset rather than a liability. But it only says that if we permit it legally. On the other hand, permitting a large and regularized gap to exist between what the law says and what we actually do says we are cynical and selfish bastards. After that, it almost doesn’t matter how much immigration we permit. Whatever immigration level we allow, high or low, we will have set that level as the result of a cruelly selfish calculation of our own benefit. And, of course, any gap between what the law says and what we actually do is always a standing invitation to all forms of public and private corruption – bribes, slavery, you name it.

I’ll go out on a limb and say I’d accept a law setting any legal immigration level, even zero, if in exchange I could believe that the law would be enforced.