Immigration mess shows U.S. failing as nation of laws: Bloomberg

NEW YORK, June 16 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. government's crackdown on illegal immigration, the resulting disorder in Los Angeles and other cities and the Democratic Party's response to the riots testify to the country's broken politics, reported Bloomberg News on Monday.

They also raise a deeper, less obvious, and more unsettling question: in what sense is the United States, as it wants to believe, a nation of laws?

"In a nation of laws, you might expect people to understand not just what the law says but also what it actually requires -- an important distinction," said the report. In the United States, the gap between the two is often very wide.

"Immigration law is an especially consequential case. Instead of clarifying its demands and aiming to have them enforced in a stable and predictable way, the country's politicians manipulate the law's gaps and ambiguities for partisan purposes," it noted. "The result is injustice -- together with enormous collateral damage."

"If the president could snap his fingers and beam across the border every immigrant who's in the country illegally, he wouldn't do it, because it would turn the economy upside down. The posturing on both sides -- including the constant invocation of what the law demands -- is cover for the prevailing consensus on the need to maintain fierce disagreement. In this nation of laws, that's what comes first," it added.