Decoding the immigration debate

In 1986, the United States gave amnesty to about three million illegal immigrants. The law contained provisions to prevent illegal immigrants from being hired in the United States ever again.

Today's supporters of immigration reform really don't want to talk about that. Nor do they want to talk about how many illegal immigrants will be in the country twenty years from now if the United States gives whatever-you-do-don't-call-it-amnesty to the eleven million illegal immigrants that the 1986 law utterly failed to keep out of the country.

President Bush used his weekly radio address today to blame Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid for blocking immigration reform. That should go a long way toward undoing the damage Senator Reid did to his party's November prospects when he vowed to filibuster any bill that didn't include a "path to citizenship" for illegal immigrants.

The plan shelved by the Senate on Friday was a shining and splendid piece of evidence that compromise isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Ayn Rand once observed that compromise can only be moral if it is made between claims of equal validity. A compromise between a valid claim and someone's desire, she wrote, is like offering a burglar one teaspoon of the family silver.

The people of the United States have a valid claim to a secure border and federal immigration law that regulates the number of people who can enter the country.

The people of Mexico have a desire to come to the United States and work for higher wages than they can find at home.

The businesses of the United States have a desire to allow unlimited illegal immigration in order to prevent upward pressure on wages and benefits in a growing economy.

The politicians of the United States have a desire to raise vast amounts of campaign cash from the businesses of the United States.

People who want to make a desire sound like a valid claim have their work cut out for them. One way to do it is to attempt to induce guilt on the part of the people with the valid claim. The idea is to make them surrender, since there's no easy way to defeat them.

"Immigration is an emotional issue and a vitally important one," President Bush said Saturday. "At its core, immigration is the sign of a confident and successful nation."

This is a pretty vicious statement when you look at it closely. The president uses the word "emotional" which at the very least suggests that opponents of his immigration proposals are irrational. "Emotional" can also be code for "bigoted and racist," as when Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote this about the reaction to the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision:

If Congress had passed remedial legislation a generation or more before having to enforce Brown's integration provisions, the blacks and other minorities would have achieved their rights by the middle of the twentieth century, and much of the emotional heat undoubtedly would have been avoided.

The president's statement also blurs the line between legal and illegal immigration, which is the same as supporting a totally open border but without the honesty to say so.

Then, by calling immigration "the sign of a confident and successful nation," the president suggests that opponents of his proposals are frightened isolationists whose policies would cause the United States to fail.

So the president would like you to know that if you oppose his immigration reform proposals you are a bigoted, racist, isolationist, insecure xenophobe.

Feel guilty yet? No? Wait, he'll tell you how you're living the high life on the backs of illegal immigrants who work like slaves. (Senator John McCain told a group of union construction workers last week that none of them would pick lettuce in Arizona even if it paid fifty dollars an hour. Several people in the audience offered to take the job on the spot.)

You understand, of course, that if you don't feel guilty enough to legalize illegal immigrants in exchange for recognition of your valid claim to border enforcement, the president's dream of "comprehensive" immigration reform will die the death of a dog on Capitol Hill.

Okay, then. As long as everybody understands.


Copyright 2006

Source note: The Earl Warren quotation is from his 1977 autobiography, The Memoirs of Chief Justice Earl Warren, published by Doubleday; pages 306-307.

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