Mission Impossible?
For years now it seems the Left has been blaming Bush for all the fires that have been started since that day he stood deer-in-the-headlights in front of the nation at some Texas Courthouse and told everybody he was president. It seems like decades ago actually.
But the Left, after the weak-kneed and half-hearted approach Bush took to his immigration speech/policy, must be thinking now that there are larger forces to be tamed and that Bush, rather than a cause of these fires, is really only a product of them.
It must be bad if in some ways I agree with many of the principles of Bush's speech: it is common sense to insure that our borders are adaquetely protected, and at some level the steady stream of people crossing the border without papers indicates that these borders are not safe, and the occasional story of horrible deaths of these people who are crossing at the hands of these coyotes who guide them only illustrate the generally callous nature of these coyotes and what I would assume to be a willingness to guide anybody over the border for the right price. Extra enforcement of the borders at some level makes sense.
But it also illustrates the problems that Bush's moronic decisions have forced us into -- where the money for this? Where the manpower? Where the credibility for anything he says? These are only problems to begin with.
Then there's his willingness to allow illegal aliens to apply for citizenship, a move I strongly agree with. But his proposal here is rightfully hated by the Left and wrongly hated by the Right. The path to citizenship is nigh impossible except for the most successful aliens and does really nothing to improve the lives of most of these estimated eleven million people who live in the United States. They deserve better.
The Right would believe that these people are hurting the country, bringing it down, nothing could be further from the truth. U.S. policy and policies the U.S. have supported have been generally terrible for most of the people in Latin America and have contributed greatly to the economic stagnation of Latin America and many of its social problems. Whether it has been CIA supported dirty wars or support for military dictators at the expense of democratically elected leaders or economic support for policies that have devalued currencies and sucked wealth out of Latin American countries, Latin Americans have much more to fear from us than we do from them.
As well, our bias against illegal aliens undoubtedly comes from a sense of identification; there is a clear sense that American identity and sense of itself is shifting with the influx of Latin Culture, and this has caused consternation, disguest and fear on the Right which has long held to the idea that Western European Culture as diffused through the Western European American immigrant experience must be the dominant culture in the United States. In many ways the fear on the Right with regards to immigration has been the sense that these immigrants are upsetting the balances in our culture that tilt to their idea of it. Somehow the Right has always felt that their idea of law and order, right and wrong, governance and society are the only possible ways to create a society that will not immediately become communist or worse, athiest.
Meanwhile, in their attempts to demonize the illegal immigrants they only give proof that their idea of democracy is "whatever tastes best on their palate". Countries that attract immigration tend to be dynamic and innovative and in return, society is less fixed, though not necessarily more economically mobile, at least in the short term.
The Right exists in a fiction that their worldview is not harmful and oblivious to the necessities of the Earth and of the various societies that inhabit it, their sense of power has no broad definition of responsibility in it. They justify this by pointing to the short term economic benefits that they gain from supporting particular policies and attempt to assure the larger populations that those populations are included in who benefits.
Meanwhile, on this point they have the support of most of the American people and they rally it by bringing up the spectre of fear and economic peril. We're in much more economic peril from the unchecked power of corporations that have only the next quarter's profits to guide their decisions.
Americans have not often been good at identifying what most threatens them...a lack of self-examination and only lip-service to the ideas of Hobbes and Locke joining with the traditional anti-intellectualism that runs through the population have together created a people unbelievably reactionary in regards to self-reflection.
We need borders that are safe, on the other hand, the best way to achieve that is to create good neighbor policies with Latin America that don't seek necessarily what's best for us immediately, but rather what's best to create a regional economy that doesn't chase people into the margins of our society where they can burrow into our consciousness as an imaginary threat because they are real ciphers in our society.
By playing to the emotions of the crowd, once again the Right has dumbed down the debate and misdirected the national conversation toward meaningless gestures and symbols. The question the Left has to answer is this, how do you capture a country's imagination and reason and direct it toward the necessary questions that would have us approach the real problems suggested by illegal immigration in our country rather than these false ones?
posted by Sarge @ 2:22 AM
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