I am complaining that people who assert the Northern opposition to slavery was based on moral reasons, when the very laws they passed demonstrate that they had no such moral considerations for blacks living among them.
I am pointing out that the acts of Northern states do not agree with the lofty rhetoric Northern states used to condemn slavery. In other words, they are hypocrites.
The laws passed were not directed at Southern slave catchers. They made it legal for *ANY* white person in the state to catch them, but not to return them to their masters. They were allowed to catch blacks who didn't posses proper paperwork, and sell them for profit.
This is where the idiom "Sending them down the river" comes from. The river in question was the Mississippi, and they were sending them to new slave masters in the South.
Northern laws restricting African-Americans’ movements mirrored Southern laws to the same effect.
That has nothing to do with it. Southern states had a very different view of slavery and race, while Northern states were supposed to be moral and righteous on this point. Behaving like Southern states is evidence that they didn't believe their own rhetoric.
Your argument is "they did bad things too", which doesn't excuse anyone from doing bad things.
If you were black you definitely didn't want to be out and about in a strange place without your papers in a slave state. I don't now how dangerous that would be in a free state.
Possibly more so. I would imagine there would be penalties in the South for someone harming a slave owned by someone, while there would be no such penalties in the North. In any case, it would have been ill luck to be in such a situation either in the North or the South.
You also seem to be talking like there's something morally wrong about Americans not wanting to lose their jobs to foreigners imported here by wealthy corporations, ...
Not at all. I agree that we shouldn't be importing cheap foreigners to do the work Americans can do. I'm just pointing out it was this same fear which created most of the Northern animosity directed at slavery. It certainly wasn't any concern for the well being of the blacks!
I try to make people see that the issues of the past have similar iterations in the present. This is an example of that, though I think the fear in 1850 would be much more dire than it is now. People were often hand to mouth back then, and a threat to their ability to earn a living would be seen as a serious threat indeed!
...or something morally wrong about Americans not wanting to see a major transformation of their culture by new arrivals brought here because they are willing to work cheap and are regarded as docile and easily controlled.
Again you are mistaken. I don't support that either. I don't want people from different and especially subservient cultures coming here. I don't want them from third world violent cultures. I don't want them from cultures that are simply incompatible with American ideas and views.
And to be thoroughly honest, I don't want anyone who is non-Christian or non-Jewish. (I see Christianity as Judaism 2.0) I don't want any Muslims or other pagan religions over here.
I have long objected to the interpretation of the Constitution to pretend all religions are equal. I am convinced that was not the Framer's intent, and the original meaning has been bastardized.
So no, I don't want people from third world sh*tholes coming to America.
You are naive and don't live in the real world.
You misjudge me. I agree with the current sentiment of keeping out these H1-B Visas, and I even agree with 1850s Northerners concerned about slaves taking their jobs.
I just want people to accurately understand how what we see today is a reflection of what happened in the 1850s.
As you kept saying the Constitution and federal laws demanded that state and local magistrates return runaways to their masters. Were state laws even necessary? Slave catching was a business protected by federal law, but there wasn't any credentialing organization, so people could set themselves up in the business and exercise the prerogatives that federal law gave slave catchers. My suspicion is that most of the time they were in the border areas and often lived in slave states, and weren't scattered throughout the North.
If you were a Northerner who didn't want Black people coming into your state were you really up on a moral high horse about it? Were you really hypocritical? You recognized that you were acting in your own interest, and you would be happy that Blacks were on plantations and not next door to you. You didn't care about the moral question and usually didn't vote for parties that had objections to slavery.
People who did have moral objections to slavery didn't expect a massive number of runaways or freedmen moving into their community, but they opposed slave catching and the fugitive slave laws on principle. They weren't really hypocrites either.
I wouldn't be hard on those in between. When moral concepts change it takes people a while to catch up to them. People recognized that in some sense slavery was wrong, but more than that they also didn't want it in their neighborhood. They were willing to let slaveowners have their slavery as long as they kept it away. At that time, that was a sensible and defensible position, one that gave slaveowners the benefit of much goodwill, though not the positive approval and unassailability they demanded.
Once war came, it did become a war between pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces and moralism entered into the conflict. It became a conflict between freedom and slavery, and for some between Good and Evil, but Southerners were just as convinced that they were the moral ones with the just cause. There was hypocrisy on both sides.
But why you feel it necessary to make this departure from the debate over immigration and H-1B visas is beyond me. What possible purpose does it serve? I've been very grateful to Donald Trump that after this election we are talking about expanding our country (as silly as those proposals about Canada and Greenland sound), rather than tearing it apart. Do we really need another year of this stuff?