Moral turpitude has never been defined by statute in US law, making it a peculiarly vague term for something with so much power in the US legal system. However, one commonly accepted definition by the US courts is that moral turpitude refers to behaviour which is intrinsically or inherently wrong – vile, base and contrary to society’s accepted rules of morality. This definition seems to be going back to the original Latin meaning of shameful behaviour – in US law it is defined as an act so against nature that it is the act itself and not the prohibition of it which makes it a crime. This is a very harsh definition for an act which can be excused with a US entry waiver.
Moral turpitude was not always a solely American term. It was more widely used in the pre-twentieth century Western World, and was also used in defining/discussing laws in both Canada and the UK. While the UK used moral turpitude to describe charges laid against people in the early 1800s and to determine their severity (as recorded in English transcripts of parliament), such language had been abandoned for more open terms by the twenty-first century. The UK’s current legislation regarding immigration has a “General grounds for the refusal of entry clearance…” section which lays out regulations based not on the “moral turpitude” of immigrants, but on their compliance with the requirements of the Immigration Act, the passing of their medical examination and the approval of the Secretary of State that they are no danger to the public good.
Canada wrote moral turpitude into its legislation – mainly in its immigration regulation legislation in the first half of the twentieth century, most likely influenced by the United States immigration laws. The US immigration laws were older than their Canadian counterparts, having been toughened in the late 1800s to deal with the influx of European immigrants driven to the US by the industrial revolution. The term was first included in American immigration law in 1891. Canada, after including the term moral turpitude in various revisions of its Immigration Act from 1910 to 1927, eventually let it go; the current Immigration Act is worded much differently. It is now called the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and is divided up accordingly – the first half dealing with Immigration, the second half dealing with Refugee Protection.
There is no longer any reference to the desired “morality” of the foreign nationals as there was under the early 1900s law in Canada; in 1910, part of the law stated persons convicted of crimes of moral turpitude or of being prostitutes or pimps were prohibited from entering Canada. Instead, the Act has a division entitled “Inadmissibility”, with sub-headings of “Security”, “Human or international rights violations”, “Serious criminality”, “Criminality”, “Organized criminality”, “Health grounds”, “Financial grounds” and “Non-compliance with Act”. The Canadian Immigration Act has changed from using morality-based exclusions to ones founded on international law and on security and health safety reasons.
The US laws concerning immigrants continue to be worded using distancing language; note the difference in the American use of “alien” to refer to a non-US citizen and the Canadian use of “foreign national”. The US seems content to cling to the legal arm-reach the vague “moral turpitude” gives them when evaluating people for US Entry Waivers. US lawmakers do not appear willing to even think about dropping moral turpitude from the books for something such as “good character”.
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