Why is diplomatic immunity even a thing? Why was this particular job decided to be above the law?
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Generally it’s a gesture of good faith between nations. Without it there’s always the implicit threat that another nation will arreat their diplomat on trumped up charges for political leverage. Our congresspeople and president have similar immunities essentially to prevent another politician from arresting all their opposition and voting on things uncontested. You might remember a few fascist governments which rose to power in ways like this from history classes, and we aren’t keen on repeating those mistakes (and actually this was one area where our founding fathers had some extremely effective forethought).
Sure it causes tensions every so often when a diplomat does something embarassing, but it helps mitigate one of the easy paths to war, so it’s a bit of a calculated risk.
It should be noted that this kind of immunity is also useful because diplomats don’t always know every local law, and may ocassionally break some on accident. Sure we brief them pretry well, but accidents happen, and a diplomat being able to get to a place unobstructed can also be the difference between war and peace between two nations. You wouldn’t want a speeding ticket to make a diplomat late to nuclear talks afterall.
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