Following the law isn’t a moral imperative. Most of us have broken the law before: speeding, using proscribed substances, “forgetting” to declare items at customs, etc. A cursory glance at history turns up all sorts of cases where civil disobedience changed our laws and systems for the better. (There are, of course, also counterexamples where civil disobedience led to strife and violence. The larger point is that the law is mutable; its mutability is a feature, not a bug.)

As to the “merit” argument: designing merit-based systems is hard. Merit is neither totally ordered nor easily perceived - see, for instance, any amount of research about the effectiveness of interviewing processes. (TL;DR: it’s really low; most interviewers make up their minds in the first few seconds of an interaction; without blind interview practices, decisions are often biased.)

To put it bluntly, I very much do not share that faith. I consider it rather more likely that any “merit-based” system instituted would be used to give the appearance of legitimacy to racial profiling in immigration policy.