Famously, J. Paul Getty said that if you owe the bank one hundred dollars, that’s your problem; if you owe the bank $100 million, that’s the bank’s problem. A similar dynamic is at work with immigration. If you’ve been in the country for a few months or years without legal status, that’s your problem. If you’ve been in the country for two or three decades without legal status, that’s the government’s problem.
Of course it’s an absurdity to deport thirty-something Anglophones who have no memory of their country of origin back to Mexico or Guatemala. And it looks gratuitous to use them as bargaining chips in the immigration debate.
Decades of Republican lies about immigration reform and enforcement have led us to this point. In 1986 restrictionists were told that a limited amnesty would be followed by rigorous enforcement. The amnesty wasn’t as limited as promised, and the enforcement never came. Since that time, every few years, a new “comprehensive” approach to immigration tries to bring Republicans back to the 1980s. Republicans get out on the trail and make campaign commercials saying “Finish the dang fence!” Then they get in office and write up a massive amnesty to go along with a doubling of legal immigration.
Along came Trump, who can beat anyone at a game of promising things he won’t deliver. He very quickly out-promised normal Republicans on immigration reform. Part of his success in convincing restrictionists that he was serious was his willingness to say impolitic or even outright racist things when talking about the issue. His willingness to take some political damage for their cause, they reasoned, was a sign of authenticity. Yet you have to wonder sometimes: In the long run, did the political damage fall on Trump or on the restrictionist cause?
So what is to be done going forward?
A serious country, one that cared about the democratic nature of its society, would never have permitted a population of 800,000 people who fit the “Dreamer” description build up in this country and live so much of their lives here without legal status. That’s why it was such an easy political win for Obama to grant them a simulation of legal status. He was addressing an urgent issue, and doing so from a position of liberality, even if not lawful.
Three decades of negligence is enough. It has created an America that is more socially divided, it has habituated a population of millions of newcomers to the idea that American law turns on a whim, and it has radicalized people who just want to have what Peter Thiel called a normal country.
Trump has thrown down the gauntlet to a Republican caucus in a crude and cynical way. Even so, they should still take up the opportunity to resolve the legal status of the “Dreamers” and everyone else living here without the full protection of the law too.This, like pretty much everything that comes onto Republican legislators' / policy-crafters' plates, got to this ridiculous state because there was a lack of the spine required to adhere to principle.
Illegal aliens have been quite profitable. Working often with forged documents they for decades have left taxes paid undeclared, the only beneficiary was the IRS. No one complained there. The lack of legislative guidance,laws enforced or amended, and willingness of business to under pay illegal aliens I suppose has nothing to do with it. Now we want our jobs back. Maybe we are to lazy to do them?
ReplyDeleteYour diagnosis is correct. And now it's time to remove that profitability from the equation.
ReplyDelete