C. S. Lewis, Natural Law, and Immigration Non‑Enforcement
In Mere Christianity C. S. Lewis writes: “Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance.” Lewis assumes an objective moral law (the Tao) that orders personal life, social life, and life under civil law. When that law is ignored, the result is not only discrete and individual harms, but a progressive deformation and distortion of persons and societies.
One way to describe this objective moral law is natural law—a law imprinted on the hearts of all people and made known through the faculties of reason and revelation. For many Christian conservatives, this conception dovetails with the thinking of our Founding Fathers, who drew on both Biblical and natural-law standards in framing the Declaration of Independence. The authority claimed in the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution comes from “We the People,” but the Founders understood from whence the authority of “We the People” itself is derived: we are “endowed by our Creator with certain rights,” rights given not by man but by our Creator. This is the crucial connection between the moral–spiritual predicate and the temporal grounding of our legal system and of the rules that govern all our social environs.
Let us use immigration law as an example, bringing together Lewis’s idea of a cascading progression of evil and sin with the idea of a legal standard rooted in a universally accepted moral predicate.
Lewis insists that moral language presupposes a real standard; if there is no “Real Morality,” then calling Nazi ethics “worse” than others becomes meaningless. In the same way, calling our President and his supporters “racist” or “fascist” is meaningless if it is not anchored in genuine moral pillars. When a polity systematically refuses to obey its own laws, it begins to lose the ability to use its legal and moral predicates coherently.
The initial decision to decline enforcement of existing immigration law—often in the name of humanitarianism or economic convenience—sets off cascading economic distortions: the creation of a shadow labor market; systematic underpayment; tolerance of employer violations “in order to compete”; and an artificially cheap sub‑economy (in agriculture, construction, hospitality, and beyond) that then “justifies” depressed wages more broadly.
In response, legal artifices and ad hoc measures (such as granting licenses, local voting rights, and other accommodations) are crafted to regularize what the system refused to confront at the outset, rather than to vindicate the original law’s substantive justice. Alongside these moves comes semantic erosion: terms like “worker,” “immigrant,” “citizen,” “exploitation,” and even “rights” are stretched to cover mutually incompatible realities. Policy debate degenerates into a contest of slogans and political narratives, rather than a rational exchange of reasons.
This is Lewis’s “compound interest” of evil in institutional form. A bridgehead is established when a clear law (immigration statutes) is not enforced for reasons of expediency or sentiment. Once that bridgehead is surrendered, subsequent “necessary” adjustments and exceptions are not neutral; they follow the internal logic of the first surrender and multiply its effects.
Historically, slave systems, indentured servitude, and caste labor arrangements have shrouded themselves in the language of economic indispensability: “Without this class, who will harvest, clean, build? How will the debt be paid?” That cry is not a neutral question; it is, in Lewisian terms, evidence of self‑chosen blindness—a refusal to see that the economic order is now resting on institutionalized disregard of persons.
It then becomes easier to see how, once the moral law is discarded in favor of humanistic, atomistic, progressive precepts, our predicates themselves become instruments of power and emotion. Subjectivism “eats” the language from within; we continue to speak of “justice,” but no longer mean anything determinate by it. Lewis would say that once the shared moral law is discarded, our intuitive predicates cease to be truth‑tracking descriptions and instead become tools of will and sentiment.
On Lewis’s terms, the cascade can be sketched as follows:
- First-stage sin: a deliberate refusal to treat certain persons under the same moral law as others (here, treating immigrants as a legally and economically exploitable class).
- Second-stage artifices: legal and economic constructs built to stabilize the first-stage injustice, generating a false sub‑economy and a differentiated class of semi‑persons.
- Third-stage blindness: participants in the system lose the capacity even to name the arrangement truthfully; questions such as “Who will do the work?” displace questions about what is owed to workers as moral agents.
The point is not that every Biblical norm must be codified into civil statute. Rather, when a polity freely enacts a law that embodies a genuine moral predicate (for example, non‑exploitation. equal protection or freedom of conscience) and then persistently refuses to enforce it, that refusal has profound formative effects. The damage lies not only in the immediate injustices, but also in the way it trains both rulers and ruled to treat law as a negotiable suggestion rather than a binding moral commitment—precisely the kind of subjectivism Lewis warns will, in the end, destroy civilization.
