“A Skeptical Argument”: It’s Silly To Oppose A Path To Citizenship Because It’s “Unfair”
Senator Ted Cruz isn’t a fan of the “path to citizenship” for illegal immigrants already in the United States. His remarks on the subject were a response to a new immigration proposal in Congress. “There are some good elements in this proposal, especially increasing the resources and manpower to secure our border and also improving and streamlining legal immigration,” he said. “I have deep concerns with the proposed path to citizenship. To allow those who came here illegally to be placed on such a path is both inconsistent with the rule of law and profoundly unfair to the millions of legal immigrants who waited years, if not decades, to come to America legally.”
Over the years, I’ve grown increasingly skeptical of that argument.
The typical illegal immigrant is born, through no fault of his own, into an impoverished country with low standards of living, endemic corruption, and few economic opportunities for bettering his lot. There are richer countries where he could live a much better life. But the people born into those richer countries, owing to nothing but dumb luck, have enacted restrictive immigration laws that make it effectively impossible for someone of his stature to immigrate legally.
In one of those rich countries, the United States, most people who made the restrictive laws wouldn’t even be here but for the unrestricted immigration policy that prevailed when their ancestors arrived.
But back to the typical illegal immigrant.
In his impoverished land, he faces a choice: severely limit his life opportunities by staying in his home country; play the lottery of immigrating legally, which almost always consigns him to the same fate; or bid his family goodbye, sneak across the border, get a job, send much-needed money home to his loved ones, and radically improve his own life prospects by performing honest labor for people who want to buy it. His sneaking in doesn’t take anyone else’s “spot.” No legal immigrant was slowed down by his illegal entry. But he did break a duly codified law.
Is that unfair? Let’s say that it is.
Here he is in the United States seven years later. He’s been regularly employed. He hasn’t committed any crimes. He’s better off. His family back home is better off. His employer is better off. There may be people without high-school diplomas who are slightly worse off due to lower wages.
Am I to understand that fairness demands that the people born into the rich country through sheer luck forcibly repatriate the man to the poor country where he was born through no fault of his own?
That’s counterintuitive!
In fact, it’s among the worst of the arguments against a path to citizenship. And it isn’t improved by invoking supposedly wronged legal immigrants. There’s a tiny subset of people from other countries so unusually lucky that they win the immigration lottery — they get to come here legally, without sneaking across a dangerous border, because of luck. You’re telling me that fairness is advanced if, for those lucky few, we deport the guy who lost the immigration lottery?
When he is arrested, jailed for a few months, flown to a city not his own in his home country, and returns to the place of his birth, an impoverished village where he has no friends or prospects, I’m supposed to look at that outcome and think, Well, good, the fair thing happened!?
There may be good arguments for opposing a “path to citizenship.” Fairness is not one of them.
By: Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic, January 29, 2013
“A Kinder, Gentler Discrimination”: How The GOP Is Talking Itself Past The “Amnesty” Trap
If you had to sum up immigration reform’s crushing defeat in 2007 in one word, there would be exactly one choice: Amnesty.
That single characterization of proposals to legalize the undocumented population became a rallying cry on the right, presaging the tea party revolution and overthrowing the best laid plans of George W. Bush and Ted Kennedy alike.
As Republicans take their first steps toward backing a comprehensive immigration bill with many of the same features as their 2007 effort, the wounds of the “amnesty” tag are still raw. Not coincidentally, one of the first tasks for any prominent conservative endorsing reform is to try and neutralize the word.
On Monday, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), whose entire career was threatened by an anti-immigration backlash in Arizona, used the dreaded a-word to describe the status quo.
“The reality that’s been created is a de facto amnesty,” McCain told reporters at a press conference introducing his own bipartisan plan Monday. “We have been too content for too long to allow individuals to mow our lawn, serve our food, clean our homes, and even watch our children, while not affording them any of the benefits that make our country so great.”
Al Cardenas, chairman of the American Conservative Union and a supporter of reform, also used the “de facto amnesty” label but in a nice partisan twist, applied it to President Obama’s policies halting deportations on young undocumented immigrants.
“As a result of the White House Executive Orders last year, we now have a defacto amnesty status which can only be fixed through legislation,” Cardenas said in a statement on Monday. “We will soon know whether President Obama is more interested in finding solutions to our nation’s immigration challenges or yet another opportunity for political grand standing and ‘gotcha’ politics.”
Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) condemned amnesty repeatedly in an interview with MSNBC the same day while also calling for some form of immigration reform, prompting her hosts to ask just what she meant by the term.
“You know, amnesty is allowing people who came in the country to stay in the country — not asking them to make that situation right, not asking them to pay those back taxes,” she said. “I think that what we need to do is very carefully look at what this pathway is going to be. We have to make certain that there is not going to be an amnesty that encourages more amnesty.”
Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) adopted a similar definition on MSNBC Tuesday when asked whether he felt the Senate’s proposal was “amnesty,” saying he thought it was “pretty tough love” by requiring undocumented immigrants to pay fines, back taxes, and pass a background check to qualify for legal status.
This definition of amnesty as “legal status without penalties” is largely in line with talking points circulated by the conservative Hispanic Leadership Network, which include a host of neat tricks for shaking the label. Among them:
Don’t begin with “We are against amnesty” Note: Most everyone is against amnesty and this is interpreted as being against any reform.…
Do acknowledge that the true meaning of amnesty is to pardon without any penalty
Don’t label earned legal status as amnesty…
Don’t focus on amnesty as a tenet of immigration reform
Don’t use President Reagan’s immigration reform as an example applicable today
Note: That legislation was true amnesty; in addition, border security, fixing our visa system, and a temporary worker program were parts of the reform which were never implemented.
For every Republican on TV trying to redefine the term, however, there will be plenty looking to ride the same resentments that powered grassroots opposition to immigration reform in 2007. “It’s very difficult for me to support something that allows that type of amnesty,” Rep. Pete King (R-NY) told Newsday on Monday, explaining his opposition to the Senate plan.
By: Benjy Sarlin, Talking Points Memo, January 29, 2013
“The Poison Pill”: Immigration Reform, The Southwest Commission And A Path To Nowhere
As the pundits swoon over bipartisanship and Senate Republicans jump all over themselves to say that yes, they support the latest blueprint for comprehensive immigration reform, they seem to be mostly forgetting the teeny, tiny detail that can derail the whole thing—a pathway to citizenship that would depend upon:
… a commission of governors, law enforcement officials and community leaders from border states that would assess when border security measures had been completed.
And therein lies the rub. No one seems to agree on what kind of power this commission would have in determining when our borders are forevermore secure, thus opening up that elusive pathway to citizenship. Democratic senators say it would have an “advisory” role, while Republicans insist that:
[W]e have to make sure that the way this law is structured, [it] ensures — guarantees — that the enforcement things happen…. Yes. That’s absolutely one of the key standards I bring, it’s one of the key parts of our principles.
So which is it? No one seems to be sure, but the fact is, it can be the poison pill that kills any kind of immigration reform. If the only pathway to citizenship is getting an A-okay from a commission that will include Arizona’s bigoted Gov. Jan Brewer—champion of SB1070, the vile walking-while-brown law—then the legislation will be nothing but a fig leaf for Republicans heading into the 2014 elections, and every Democrat should oppose it.
Granted, any legislation is probably DOA once it hits the House anyway, because let’s face it, there are House Republicans who are two steps shy of requiring suspicious-looking brown people to sew a sombrero on their clothes. But do you think they would even consider anything less than a commission—that would include the nutcase who imagines headless corpses littering the desert—having the final say on when our borders are secure? No way.
The bottom line is, we don’t know—and Republicans certainly aren’t saying—exactly what power this commission would have. But they were certainly quick to disagree with their Democratic counterparts who said it would only have an advisory role. And without a real pathway to citizenship, any legislation masquerading as immigration reform would be meaningless.
By: Barbara Morrill, Daily Kos, January 29, 2013
“GOP Immigration Catch-22”: Do Republicans Support President Obama’s Immigration Plan And Anger Rush Limbaugh?
Yesterday, a bipartisan group of eight senators unveiled a comprehensive immigration-reform plan. Today, Barack Obama gave a speech outlining a very similar plan, causing the four Republicans in that group to disavow their own plan as a socialist plot whose only plausible purpose is to bring a tsunami of radical Kenyan immigrants to our shores so they can marry our women and produce future presidents who will further weaken this great nation.
OK, so that’s not really what happened. But given recent experience, it wouldn’t have been all that surprising if it had. Now that Barack Obama has joined the immigration debate with his own plan (like the bipartisan one, at this point it’s not particularly detailed), it will take all the fortitude Republicans can muster to keep from doing a 180, just as they did on the individual health-insurance mandate and cap and trade, once those ideas were infected by contact with Obama. They know that their political future may depend on not screwing up this debate and alienating Latino voters any more than they already have. But in order to accomplish their political goal they may have to—and if there are young ones in the room you may want to cover their ears—agree with President Obama. Horrible, it’s true, and it just shows how diabolical the president is that he maneuvered them into this position.
There will no doubt be twists and turns before this debate comes to an end, and along the way the Republicans pushing reform may spend most of their time assuring their base that they haven’t sold their soul to the dark lord in the Oval Office. This afternoon, Senator Marco Rubio, who wisely told Mitt Romney he had no interest in being his running mate, visited Rush Limbaugh to assure the talk show host that he’d be happy to walk away from a deal if it wasn’t bristling with drones and border-enforcement agents. Limbaugh, who yesterday said “It’s up to me and Fox News” to kill immigration reform, praised Rubio but was plainly unconvinced.
And that’s the dilemma—a familiar one for Republicans. On one side you have the majority of the public favoring immigration reform. On the other you have the GOP’s base and its media figures, always pulling the party to the right. Satisfy one, and you’ll anger the other. It’s almost enough to make you feel sorry for them.
By: Paul Waldman and Jamie Fuller, The American Prospect, January 29, 2013
“The Bolsheviks Of The Right”: The GOP Brings Politics To A Crisis Point
Really, what is to be done about this Republican Party? What force can change it—can stop Republicans from being ideological saboteurs and convert at least a workable minority of them into people interested in governing rather than sabotage? With the failed Plan B vote, we have reached the undeniable crisis point. Actually we’ve been at a crisis point for years, but this is really the all-upper-case Undeniable Crisis Point. They are a direct threat to the economy, which could slip back into recession next year if the government doesn’t, well, govern. They are an ongoing, at this point almost mundane, threat to democracy, subverting and preventing progress the American people clearly desire across a number of fronts. They have to be stopped, and the only people who can really stop them are corporate titans and Wall Streeters, who surely now are finally beginning to see that America’s problem is not Barack Obama and his alleged “socialism,” but a political party that has become psychologically incapable of operating within the American political system.
We all know that the GOP has become much more extreme in the last few years, and, taking the longer historical view, the last 20 or 25 years. But when that gets said, it usually elides an important point—the important point. It’s usually meant to refer to the party’s policy positions. And the move to the hard right is obviously true along those lines.
But politics, and certainly political parties, aren’t only about policy positions. There’s also the question of what I’ll call process, which means simply how a party practices politics on a day-to-day, month-to-month, and year-to-year basis. This isn’t a question of the positions per se, but how the party attempts to advance and defend them.
And it’s on process far, far more than on policy that the Republican Party has gone nutso. You know this story, too, so I needn’t rehearse the details, except to describe the current end point, which is that to the GOP today, the Democrats must be denied any victory by any means necessary. The Republicans unwilling to vote for Plan B weren’t in the main loathe to give Boehner a win. The problem was that that particular Boehner win might have led to an Obama win. That was the issue that drove them.
In that sense, all these people saying they learned no lesson from the election are completely wrong. They learned a lesson, all right, but the lesson they took away is just the opposite of the kind of lesson normal small-d democrats would learn. Normal small-d democrats would learn that you’ve lost twice now, and while you should still stick to your principles of course, it was also time to play a little ball. But these Republicans learned that they have to be even more obstructionist. Their ideas are unpopular, their America is dying. But by God, they’re standing until the last man! They’re Paulus’s soldiers at Stalingrad, surrounded by an enemy that embodies evil—and is fated to outlast them. This is how they’ve been trained to think.
So they’ll give no ground. People are now saying that the only way to avoid going off the cliff is for Boehner to let the Senate bill come to the floor and let it be passed mostly by Democrats. But what reason is there to believe that even 20 or 25 Republicans would vote for a bill? And please, don’t tell me “because a large majority of Americans would support it.” That doesn’t matter to them.
And next year, in January or February, when Joe Biden’s task force completes its work and we have new gun legislation? We have now rafts of new polling showing that clear majorities will support the kinds of proposals that are likely to be in any such legislation. But that won’t matter. They have the votes to block, and they will. And then perhaps Obama will attempt immigration reform, again with a solid majority of Americans behind him. They showed a few post-election signs of yielding here, so we’ll see. But as the issue heats up, the usual sources will start warning even the softer-hearted GOP legislators that a vote for immigration is a vote for Obama, you quisling, and if you waver on this you can certainly expect a primary challenge.
They didn’t come to Washington to govern. They came to sabotage. So our working assumption must be whatever the issue, sabotage is what they’re going to do.
And they can do it all they want. Our founders didn’t assume that a cadre of people of such immense bad faith and cynicism would ever come to control key levers of government; they built a system that would work, albeit slowly, in the hands of people of reasonably good will. It’s a system that people of bad will can subvert and stop from functioning.
Someone has to tell them enough. The only people I can think of with the power to do so are the high-profile figures of Wall Street and the corporate world. They’re the only people these Republicans might conceivably listen to. They should have done it—and some did—last year during the debt-limit hostage-taking. But then, most of corporate American was still wagering that the Republicans could beat Obama in 2012. Now that that hasn’t happened, now that we’re four years away from another election and Obama will be retiring anyway, and now that the Republicans have demonstrated that they are interested in no compromise at all in any way shape or form, maybe the business elite will finally show some responsibility.
Once upon a time, the statists—Roosevelt and his brains trusters—helped save capitalism from the Bolsheviks of the left. Today, the capitalists have to help save the state. This time the enemy is the Bolsheviks of the right, our current GOP. They’re taking us over the fiscal cliff, and they’ll do far worse without an intervention.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, December 23, 2012
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