“We’ve Adapted Before, And We’ll Adapt Again”: Immigrants’ Energy And Vitality Ought To Be Celebrated
“This is a blessing from God.”
“I’ve always had to look behind my back. Now I don’t have to worry so much.”
“This is a very amazing moment.”
According to news reports, those sentiments — hope, relief, gratitude, joy — have been expressed by immigrants heartened by President Obama’s decision to delay deportation for as many as 4 million people who entered the country without papers. They are ordinary folks eager for a semblance of normalcy — the right to a driver’s license, the ability to get a job legally, the respite from constant worry — in the adopted country they now call home.
While Obama’s action has drawn withering criticism from his conservative critics, the president framed his decision as an attempt to keep families from being torn apart. According to the Migration Policy Institute, some 3.7 million adults who came into the United States without authorization have at least one child who was born here or has legal permanent status and has been here five or more years.
Those children are firmly ensconced in their communities, anchored in their schools or workplaces, and strangers to the nations in which their parents were born. They speak English; they surf the Internet; they obsess over the latest smartphone. In other words, they are as American as your kids and mine.
What sort of country would separate them from their parents or force them to leave? Why not embrace them for the vitality they bring to us?
Opponents of Obama’s executive order are given to a heavy reliance on the rules and regulations of permissible entry, the legal codes that govern borders and visas and citizenship. It’s certainly true that unauthorized immigrants have violated those statutes — stealing across a river, sneaking through a desert, ignoring a previously agreed-upon departure.
But surely there is something to be said for leniency, for mercy, for generosity toward those who have, after all, committed only a misdemeanor, which is how the law characterizes a first-time illegal entry. (Obama’s executive order pointedly excludes those who have committed felonies.)
That mercy ought to be freely meted out since Americans bear some complicity in the law-breaking, some responsibility for the unauthorized sojourns taken by so many gardeners, cooks and nannies, painters, ditch diggers and fruit pickers. Back in the go-go 1990s, we practically threw open the gates and invited in low-skilled workers who were happy to do the jobs that Americans didn’t want to do.
There was more than enough work to go around in an economy where the unemployment rate dropped to as low as 4 percent, and native-born laborers shunned sweaty work picking Vidalia onions, toting drain pipe and laying sod. Undocumented workers proved cheap and compliant, unable to complain when safety regulations were violated and wages were substandard.
So they came by the millions, in Democratic and Republican administrations. They stayed, they worked hard, they married and had children. They adopted our values and called this country their own.
Perhaps it was inevitable that a backlash would be swift and furious, especially after the economy turned sour and the middle class shrank. Besides, every immigrant wave in the nation’s history — whether Irish or Polish or Chinese — has provoked an eruption of anger and resentment.
This backlash has been building since at least the early aughts, when President George W. Bush tried to pass legislation that would give the undocumented legal status and a path to citizenship. Ultraconservatives in his party rebelled, even as business executives pleaded for a compromise that would satisfy their need for workers.
The resentment was seeded, in part, by the reality of demographic change — by, yes, the discomfort produced by racial and ethnic differences. Older Americans, especially, have recoiled at a country that grows browner and more diverse, where Spanish-language signs dominate some neighborhoods and soccer fields replace baseball diamonds. That, too, has happened before in our history as immigrants brought their customs and religions and languages.
But the nation adapted before, and we’ll adapt again. That constant rejuvenation is one of the nation’s strengths, that energy and vitality is one of our advantages. We, too, ought to be grateful those immigrants are getting a shot at the American dream.
By: Cynthia Tucker, Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2007; The National Memo, November 29, 2014
“Until Justice Rolls Down Like Waters”: Something Much Bigger Than What One Police Officer Or One Prosecutor Does
Once again we find ourselves reckoning with the reality that we live in a country where justice is applied unequally. But the truth is – unequal justice is no justice as all. To keep our “eyes on the prize,” it might be helpful to step back and envision just what it is we mean by the word “justice.”
Back in 1963, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke at the memorial service for the four little girls who had died in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Imagine with me for a moment if he had said these words about the killing of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, or Tamir Rice.
And so this afternoon in a real sense they have something to say to each of us in their death. They have something to say to every minister of the gospel who has remained silent behind the safe security of stained-glass windows. They have something to say to every politician who has fed his constituents with the stale bread of hatred and the spoiled meat of racism. They have something to say to a federal government that has compromised with the undemocratic practices of southern Dixiecrats and the blatant hypocrisy of right-wing northern Republicans. They have something to say to every Negro who has passively accepted the evil system of segregation and who has stood on the sidelines in a mighty struggle for justice. They say to each of us, black and white alike, that we must substitute courage for caution. They say to us that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers. Their death says to us that we must work passionately and unrelentingly for the realization of the American dream.
When Dr. King quoted the scripture that says “Until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream,” he was referring to something much bigger than what one police officer or one prosecutor does. And it was something much more audacious than what happens in a court room.
Now don’t get me wrong. Dr. King said we should not “merely” be concerned about the murderers. Holding people accountable for their crimes is certainly a part of justice. But the truth is…he had a finger to point at all of us for our complicity.
Too many of us in this country have bought into the idea that jail = justice. If we just send the perpetrators to prison, we can wipe our hands clean and assume that justice has been done. That’s one of the reasons this country has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Yes, I know that its also because of the failed “war on drugs.” But that war was based on the idea that we can effectively deal with a problem by locking people up. So it is our addiction to prison as the solution that is at the root of the problem.
The idea that jail = justice is not something that is simply embraced by conservatives. It finds a home with liberals when we step away from what happens to the poor and start thinking about the crimes of the wealthy. For example, Bailey Miller writes: Can We Please Put Some Bankers in Jail Now? In it, Miller doesn’t grapple with what justice would mean for the activities that led to the Great Recession. The assumption seems to be that – until the bankers are put in jail – justice has not been served.
But Miller does point out that for then-Deputy U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder (and eventually the Bush administration), the idea of justice went beyond sending the specific perpetrators to jail.
One clue might be the contents of a memo written by Holder in 1999, during his stint as deputy U.S. attorney general. The document, “Bringing Criminal Charges Against Corporations,” urged prosecutors to take into account “collateral consequences” when pursuing cases against companies, lest they topple and take the economy down with them. Holder also raised the possibility of deferring prosecution against corporations in an effort to spur greater cooperation and reforms…
I would suggest that Holder’s concept of justice is more in line with the one articulated by Dr. King. First of all, it took into consideration what justice would mean for all of the innocent people who would be impacted by the prosecution of a corporation. But secondly, more than sending perpetrators to jail, he had his eyes on reforming “the system, the way of life, the philosophy that produced” the crimes.
I’ll leave it to another day to discuss the role prisons should play in our search for justice. Suffice it to say, I agree with Al Giordano.
Prison should always be a last resort, and only for someone who will put others at risk with predatory behavior. It doesn’t work as a deterrent. As a punishment, it is barbaric. My concept of a just and better world has almost nobody in prison, not even people I hate or who have done bad things. The whole thing has to be rethought…
A re-thinking of what justice means would require us to consider the affirmative rather than simply the reactionary. One place to start might be with the words of Bryan Stevenson: “The opposite of poverty is not wealth. Its justice.” When I think about what that means, it gets the brain synapses going in a whole different direction than jail = justice. And I can begin to imagine what it would mean for justice to roll down like waters.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal, The Washington Monthly, November 28, 2014
“More Consequential And Far-Reaching”: Why The Supreme Court Should Be The Biggest Issue Of The 2016 Campaign
Supreme Court justice and pop culture icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg left the hospital yesterday after having a heart stent implanted and expects to be back at work Monday. Despite various health issues over the years, Ginsburg insists that she is still of sound body at age 81 (her mind isn’t in question) and has no plans to retire before the end of President Obama’s term to ensure a Democratic replacement. If she keeps to that pledge, and presuming there are no other retirements in the next two years, the makeup of the Supreme Court could be a bigger campaign issue in 2016 than ever before. It certainly ought to be.
Ordinarily, the Supreme Court is brought up almost as an afterthought in presidential campaigns. The potential for a swing in the court is used to motivate activists to volunteer and work hard, and the candidates usually have to answer a debate question or two about it, which they do in utterly predictable ways (“I’m just going to look for the best person for the job”). We don’t usually spend a great deal of time talking about what a change in the court is likely to mean. But the next president is highly likely to have the chance to engineer a swing in the court. The consequences for Americans’ lives will probably be more consequential and far-reaching than any other issue the candidates will be arguing about.
As much as we’ve debated Supreme Court cases in recent years, we haven’t given much attention to the idea of a shift in the court’s ideology because for so long the court has been essentially the same: divided 5-4, with conservatives having the advantage yet liberals winning the occasional significant victory when a swing justice moves to their side. And though a couple of recent confirmations have sparked controversy (Samuel Alito and Sonia Sotomayor were both the target of failed attempts to derail their nominations), all of the retirements in the last three presidencies were of justices from the same general ideology as the sitting president. The last time a new justice was radically different from the outgoing one was when Clarence Thomas replaced Thurgood Marshall — 23 years ago.
Whether a Democrat or a Republican wins in 2016, he or she may well have the chance to shift the court’s ideological balance. Ginsburg is the oldest justice at 81; Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy are both 78, and Stephen Breyer is 76. If the right person is elected and the right justice retires, it could be an earthquake.
Consider this scenario: Hillary Clinton becomes president in 2017, and sometime later one of the conservative justices retires. Now there would be a liberal majority on the court, a complete transformation in its balance. A court that now consistently favors those with power, whether corporations or the government, would become much more likely to rule in favor of workers, criminal defendants and those with civil rights claims. Or alternately: The Republican nominee wins, and one of the liberal justices retires. With conservatives in control not by 5-4 but 6-3, there would be a cascade of even more conservative decisions. The overturning of Roe v. Wade would be just the beginning.
Look at what the Supreme Court has done recently. It gutted the Voting Rights Act, said that corporations could have religious beliefs, simultaneously upheld and hobbled the Affordable Care Act, struck down a key part of the Defense of Marriage Act and moved toward legalizing same-sex marriage, all but outlawed affirmative action, gave corporations and wealthy individuals the ability to dominate elections and created an individual right to own guns — and that’s just in the last few years.
Whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican, there is probably no single issue you ought to be more concerned about in the 2016 campaign than what the court will look like after the next president gets the opportunity to make an appointment or two. The implications are enormous. It’s not too early to start considering them.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect; The Plum Line, The Washington Post, November 28, 2014
“A Naïve View Of Politics”: The Poison-The-Well Myth, And How Politics Really Works
There are certainly some serious critiques of President Obama’s new immigration policy. It could encourage more illegal immigration in the long run. It may be another step toward an imperial presidency, detached from Congress. It definitely could have been executed less cynically, given that Mr. Obama all but admitted he delayed the announcement until after the midterms, in an (unsuccessful) effort to help Democrats on the ballot.
But there is also one critique that’s getting a lot of attention and isn’t so serious.
It’s the “poison the well” argument — the notion that Mr. Obama’s executive action to shield as many as five million people from deportation will prevent a bigger immigration bill from passing Congress and maybe prevent a whole bunch of other legislation, too.
John Boehner, the speaker of the House, and Senator Mitch McConnell, the next majority leader, have both used the phrase “poison the well.” A spokesman for Mr. Boehner said the move by Mr. Obama would “ruin the chances for congressional action on this issue and many others.” While maybe we should excuse politicians for trying to score political points, neutral commentators have picked up the argument, too. It’s one of those ideas that has the aura of sober-minded political analysis.
Obviously, we can’t run the final two years of the Obama presidency multiple times under different circumstances and see what happens in each. So it’s impossible to know for certain how any one action affects the course of events. But there are all kinds of reasons to believe that the poison-the-well theory is based on a naïve view of politics. And understanding why it’s wrong helps illuminate how politics really does work.
Whatever you may think of today’s politicians, they are highly successful people who have climbed to the top of a competitive profession. Most of the time, they make decisions that are in their interests — whether political interests or policy interests. A few notable exceptions aside (like Newt Gingrich’s infamous pique in 1995 over getting a bad seat on Air Force One), they do not make major decisions the way a small child would, based mostly on whether someone else is being nice or mean to them.
If you ask political scientists what they consider to be the biggest misconceptions about politics, you’ll often hear a version of the Nice-Mean Fallacy. The Obama presidency has offered a particularly rich set of examples. It’s true that Mr. Obama and his White House haven’t done a very good job of building relationships with Congress, and it’s true that the administration’s aloofness has probably hurt its effectiveness in some ways.
But consider the recent president whose relationship skills are often contrasted with Mr. Obama’s: Bill Clinton. Many members of Congress really did seem to prefer Mr. Clinton’s personality to Mr. Obama’s. And yet which of the two presidents failed to keep Democrats united on a major health care bill and thus failed to pass one? And which president held onto every single congressional Democrat he needed to pass such a bill?
Were the roles reversed, we no doubt would hear tales about how the gregarious president used his people skills to pass the biggest expansion of the safety net in a generation while the distant, professorial one failed. In truth, congressional Democrats weren’t making decisions based on either Mr. Clinton’s or Mr. Obama’s personality. They were making them based on bigger issues.
The Democratic Party of the early 1990s included more conservative Southerners than the 2009-10 version of the party, for example. The 2009-10 Democrats were also more desperate to succeed, remembering the disappointment of the Clinton bill and probably aware that economic inequality had worsened over the intervening decades. The Democrats stuck together because they believed doing so was in their interest.
Republicans have done the same in the Obama presidency. From the beginning, Mr. McConnell has understood that Republicans could veto Mr. Obama’s promise to be a bipartisan bridge-builder. “It’s either bipartisan or it isn’t,” Mr. McConnell said in 2010, explaining his caucus’s united opposition to the health care bill. No wonder that Republicans didn’t bite when the White House suggested adding medical-malpractice reform to the bill.
Many Republicans voters back this stance. Polls show that most want their leaders to stand on principle rather than to compromise. Democratic voters are fonder of compromise.
The story on an immigration overhaul has been similar. Some Republicans leaders see a bill as in their interests — helping them with Latino voters — and the Senate passed such a bill, 68-32, last year. Yet most House Republicans have philosophical objections and have few Latino voters in their district. House leaders have refused to bring the bill to the floor.
To accept the poison-the-well argument is to believe, first, that Republicans would have passed an immigration bill if Mr. Obama had not acted. This seems unlikely but not totally out of the question: Perhaps more Republicans want to show they can compromise now that they control both chambers, hoping their presidential nominee can win swing voters in 2016. In that case, an immigration bill might be more feasible in 2015 than it was in 2013.
But the poison-the-well theory then requires a second belief, too: That even if an immigration bill were in Republican interests, they would refuse to pass one, out of spite from Mr. Obama’s executive action. This belief seems strangely dismissive of Republicans’ instinct for self-preservation. It also conflicts with the history of both parties.
On the same day in August 1981 that President Ronald Reagan threatened to fire striking air traffic controllers, many Senate Democrats voted for his tax cut, and House Democrats did the same the next day. Mr. Clinton and congressional Republicans, less than a year after impeachment, collaborated on a sprawling bank deregulation bill in 1999. A few years later, many congressional Democrats voted for the Homeland Security Act even as President George W. Bush was calling them soft on terrorism.
In each of these cases, politicians voted with their interests, not their feelings. There is every reason to believe the same will happen over the next two years.
Some of the same Republicans worrying aloud about poisoned wells no doubt understand this reality. But they continue making the point partly because it helps unify the party on a divisive issue. “It’s a way the G.O.P. can achieve consensus,” as Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth political scientist and Upshot contributor, says. “They’re internally divided on policy on immigration but agree on a process critique of Obama’s actions.”
Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio may be on one side of some big immigration questions and conservative House Republicans may be on the other, but they can come together on metaphorical well water. Which is to say that politicians generally act in their interests, even when doing so involves pretending otherwise.
By:
“Try Getting To Know Each Other”: Don’t Argue About Politics This Thanksgiving. Just Don’t
Imagine this scene on Thanksgiving day. The turkey is partly carved, the mashed potatoes are being passed around.
Your Mother: What are you thankful for?
You: Well, if I can say so, I’m thankful for ObamaCare because it was great that I was able to sign up for health insurance on the internet.
Caricatured Uncle: Hope Reverend Wright isn’t on your death panel! Payback for Ferguson coming to you.
Your Mother [hoping to get control of the situation]: I did something different this year with the sweet potatoes! Do you like it?
Never fear. The pundits are here to save you. Think Progress has a guide on “how to argue with your Evangelical uncle” about marriage equality. Vox is advising you on Bill Cosby, Ferguson, and immigration (you’re for it as much as possible, of course).
Last year, some of Michael Bloomberg’s dollars trickled down to someone who gave you talking points on gun control. Chris Hayes is once again dedicating an hour of his MSNBC show to the cause.
Less combatively, Conor Friedersdorf advises you to adopt his brand of nodding empathy: “Before you focus on any point of disagreement, ask questions of your interlocutor to figure out why they think the way they do about the subject at hand.”
These advice columns are becoming a genre unto themselves. The stock villain: crazy right-wing uncle, the jokes about stuffing. But I recognize them by what they unwittingly emulate: guides for religious evangelism. The gentle, righteous self-regard, the slightly orthogonal response guides, the implied urgency to cure your loved ones of their ignorance. Your raging uncle will know the truth, and the truth will set him free.
That’s a problem. Our politics are taking on a religious shape. Increasingly we allow politics to form our moral identity and self-conception. We surround ourselves with an invisible community of the “elect” who share our convictions, and convince ourselves that even our closest and beloved relatives are not only wrong, but enemies of goodness itself. And so one of the best, least religious holidays in the calendar becomes a chance to deliver your uncle up as a sinner in the hands of an angry niece.
I’m as guilty of this as anyone. As a conservative raised in an argumentative and left-leaning Irish-American family, Thanksgiving and other holiday dinners did more than any professional media training to prepare me for MSNBC panels. But arguments like these, particularly when we allow politics to dominate our notions of ourselves, can leave lasting scars. And precisely because our familial relationships are so personal, the likely responses to our creamed and beaten talking points will be defensive, anxious, off-subject, or overly aggressive.
You might think you can sneak in a killer talking point about immigration reform, only to touch off a sprawling congress about the personhood of unborn children, the Vietnam War, and whether it is really sexist to describe Nancy Pelosi as a “tough broad.”
Instead, what we really need are guides for gently deflecting the conversation away from politics, as our polite grandmothers once did.
Bringing up politics can be a form of self-assertion, or a way for a family member to test whether he is accepted for who he is. One of the reasons the “conservative uncle” has become the cliched oaf of the Thanksgiving dinner is precisely because he may feel, rightly or wrongly, that the country is moving away from him. He could be testing to see whether his family is ready to reject him, too. Or he could just be an oafish, self-regarding lout. Either way, it doesn’t have to be that hard to show he is appreciated as a family member and human being.
Caricatured Uncle: Obummer sure got waxed in that election. Guess he isn’t the Messiah, huh?
You: Har har, you got me. But hey, I get to read and think about the news every day. I only see you twice a year. How is the renovation going?
Instead of honing your argument on tax reform into unassailability, maybe ask your parents or siblings ahead of time what some of the further-flung or more volatile members of your family are up to in their lives before they sit down. Get the family’s talking points, rather than Mike Bloomberg’s.
And if you do want to pointlessly and frustratingly argue about politics with your uncle, just friend him on Facebook.
By: Michael Brendan Dougherty, The Week, November 26, 2014
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