The Immigration Mess: ‘An amnesty for lousy politics’
by Pamela LeaveyAfter the immigration bill stalled in the Senate on Thursday, supporters of the bill on both sides of the aisle, vowed to revive it and the Bush Administration followed suit.
“We are not giving up, we are not giving in,” said Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, who helped write the bill in months of negotiations with the White House and a small bipartisan group of senators.
Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the chief Republican architect of the bill, voted against limiting debate. He said he wanted to give conservative Republicans “a little bit more time to get amendments together, to get them considered, so that we can finish the bill with an opportunity for everyone to have their say.”
The president said he understood the reservations some lawmakers had. “And like many senators, I believe the bill will need to be further improved along the way before it becomes law,” he said.
An editorial in the Boston Globe noted on Friday that, “TWELVE MILLION illegal immigrants were living and working inside US borders before Senators John McCain and Edward Kennedy presented their bipartisan immigration reform bill last month, and 12 million are here now.”
How can the “amnesty” opponents in the Senate who helped derail the bill Thursday possibly call that a victory?
They cannot really call it a victory and yet they are. The bill itself was a “sprawling compromise proposal that tried to cobble together concerns for national security and for social justice,” and it “had something in it for everyone to oppose, whether it was the costly border security fence, the guest worker program for illegals, or the shift away from family unification as the top priority of legal immigration.” But…
…the bill was the best hope for Congress to do what the American people elect them to do: solve the big challenges facing the country.
During the GOP debate in New Hampshire earlier this week, which was “dominated by grandstanding attacks on the legislation” and on John McCain, McCain “finest moment” the Globe editorial says, “came in defending the proposal and the thousands of immigrants whose names are etched into the Vietnam Memorial.”
Nativist shriekers, such as Representative Tom Tancredo of Colorado, even want to halt all legal immigration until such time as “we no longer have to press 1 for English” on the telephone. Rudy Giuliani mocked the “400 pages” of the legislation and called it “a Washington mess.” Increasingly, rational debate becomes the first casualty of politics.
What the bill needed was strong executive leadership, and President Bush, who is trying to stake a legacy claim to immigration reform, could not provide it. Hobbled by historically low favorability ratings and an earlier-than-usual lame duck status, Bush’s hope of redeeming his administration’s failures with a comprehensive immigration law dim further with every day he sits in the White House. And yet it would be a terrible abdication to wait until 2009 to grapple with the problem under a new president.
But here too is something to think about in all of this mess… The kids caught up in the in it all. Because around the nation as seniors graduate from high school this month, many like the ones noted by the Globe will be foreign born and each of those kids will have dreams for their future, just my daughter who graduates this month. Those kids will have worked hard to get where they got and yet some politicians in America can’t find it in themselves to honor the dreams of the children…
Last week the Globe published the pictures of all 41 Boston high school valedictorians. Fully 21 of the 41 are foreign-born: from Uganda, Vietnam, Albania, China, Haiti, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Grenada, Cape Verde, the Dominican Republic, and Jamaica. It is conceivable that one or more are children of parents who are here illegally. Their stories of hard work and hope speak to the best of what America is. Their dreams cannot be deferred while politicians dither.
Lousy politics indeed. Are we not the nation of “give me your tired, your poor“? Apparently, not any more.
Filed under: Bush Admin, Democrats, Election '08, In The News, OP/ED's, Politics, Republicans, Senate | Get Permalink or trackback |
I was watching Windtalkers a few days ago and this brings back one of the scenes. Nicholas Cage as the main character was next to another white guy on a march. The other guy was looking at one of the Navajo code talkers who had to overcome stereotypes. He talked about hearing his grandfather tell stories about getting paid a few dollars for every Comanche ear. He noted that 50 years later, the whites and Indians were fighting together, wondering if in 50 years they would all be sitting with the Japanese drinking sake.
I was watching a St Patty’s Day parade in March, thinking about how poorly the Irish were treated when they first arrived and how much trouble there was likely to be for the Cinco de Mayo parades.
And we still have the likes of Tancredo getting elected and presenting his intolerance as a legitimate idea.
As one of the sites I went to learn more about the Code Talkers pointed out, if the Navajo parents had not disregarded the directions to make their children speak English instead of learning Navajo, we might be pushing 2 for English.
Wonder what flavor ‘Tancredo’ is….
This is just TOO GOP. Tancredo is Italian. BOTH sets of his grandparents immigrated.
We need the head banger, or hair puller, icon. Head banging with hair pulling?
Please indulge a little cynicism. My reading of the situation surrounding the attempt to pass immigration legislation took me into a weird place. My starting point is that there just didn’t seem to be any real effort on the part of the administration to get this bill through. And certainly there was no evidence of the sort of sophisticated maneuvering that they pulled off on Iraq funding.
Given the fact that there is no doubt how badly Bush wants an immigration fix, are we looking at evidence that he is not really the President? There’s always been that stuff out there depicting the man as a puppet, and now I wonder if he and the puppeteer just have two very different ideas on what the immigration fix should look like.
Did he stamp his feet and demand that this one go on the agenda? And, after indulging him, was he left to devise his own failure as a way of reasserting where the real power lies? (And exactly where is that?)