Secure borders: the hot issue
James P. Pinkerton
Newsday
September 29, 2005
The sleeper issue in the 2008 presidential election is immigration. Actually, as a recent straw poll shows, it's waking up.
Since the 1960s, the elites in both parties have been solidly pro-immigration. Democrats, for their part, have figured they could burnish their anti-racism, pro-multiculturalist credentials by opening America's borders to the world's teeming masses.
During this period, the vision of "affirmative action" - special help for the mostly black disadvantaged - morphed into a new vision, "diversity." The idea behind such diversity was not a temporary compensation for the needy, but rather a permanent balkanization of the country, based on ethnicity.
Oh, and by the way, if the new immigrants, most notably Hispanics, wanted to vote Democratic - well, that was OK, too.
As for Republicans, they might have been expected to oppose this Democratic agenda, drawing upon their Lincolnian "one nation" legacy of nurturing a middle class. But GOP leaders joined with Democrats to usher in newcomers for two reasons.
First, business-minded Republicans liked more workers coming in at the bottom, busting unions and holding down wages. New immigrants were popular as inexpensive domestic servants, both rich donkeys and rich elephants agreed. And second, the GOP's ascendant neoconservative faction sought to "modernize" the party, burying once and for all the racial edge associated with Southern senators Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms. The neocons were further bewitched by the vision of everybody, from every corner of the world, becoming a liberty-loving small "d" democrat, inspired by the power of American ideas. And so, from the barrios of East L.A. to Baghdad and back to Brooklyn, the New GOP sought to implement that vision.
Some parts of this bipartisan pro-immigration policy worked as planned. Unionization has plummeted, nannies and landscapers are plentiful, and there are plenty of new poor people for bureaucratic welfare statists to lavish taxpayer-supplied "compassion" down upon. For those who happen to speak an exotic language and don't mind working in a dicey environment, there are plenty of bilingual-education teaching jobs available.
Other parts of the open-borders plan have worked less well. After 9-11, for example, we found out just how rotten our immigration and identification mechanisms were. The 19 kill-jackers had reportedly garnered 63 pieces of fake ID. So now we know - or should know - that homeland security is a joke if the government can't figure who people are and how they got here.
More broadly, the American middle class is finally saying, "Enough." Enough of illegal immigration, enough of multiculturalism, enough of carelessness about homeland security. The Silent Majority will no longer allow an arrogant elite to speak for it on fundamental issues of national and cultural destiny. The Lincoln vision - a house not divided against itself - looks pretty good right now.
George W. Bush has been a victim of this political shift. He was pursuing the same lenient bipartisan immigration policy of his presidential predecessors, and hoped by speaking a little Spanish he could garner some Latino votes. But Congressional Republicans, galvanized by Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado, rebelled against the latest lax amnesty plan, now shelved.
Now Tancredo, a tireless advocate for better border control, says he will run for president if nobody else will adopt his platform. Adding weight to his threat, Tancredo just finished second in a 2008-preference straw poll conducted by Michigan Republicans. He finished second behind Sen. John McCain of Arizona, but ahead of such better-known White House hopefuls as Sen. Bill Frist of Tennessee and Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts. The Republican Party is changing.
But interestingly, the Democrats are changing too. The Democratic governors of Arizona and New Mexico, Janet Napolitano and Bill Richardson, have both taken extraordinary steps to regain control over their border with Mexico.
So now it's a bipartisan rebellion against loose and lax immigration controls. It's about time.
James P. Pinkerton's e-mail address is pinkerto@ix.netcom.com.
Email: pinkerto@ix.netcom.com
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