How Closed or Open a Door?
Immigration conundrums.
Well, it looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue. I'm going to say something that I know is going to make my life more complicated: "I'm not outraged by Bush's immigration proposal." There you have it.
For two days it's been like doing the belly crawl through a barbed-wire field in the Corner (our blog, for those of you who are painfully ignorant of the goings-on around here). NR's mighty angry, and so are the vast majority of our readers. The cover story of the issue is dedicated to a classic, and very well done, broadside against Bush's plan. John Derbyshire wants heads to roll. Kate O'Beirne has ignited a theme for readers that has dominated my e-mail box for the last 24 hours: Conservatives and the White House represent a classic case of battered-wife syndrome — and you can guess who gets slapped around for not having dinner on the table in this metaphor. My inbox is full of subject headers like "Conservatives: The Republican Party's Bitch" and "Welcome to the Ghetto!"
The latter correspondent explains that this is a reference to the relationship between blacks and the Democratic party. Sure, African Americans don't have to vote for Democrats every time they get taken for granted, but given their convictions, they don't really have a viable alternative since they think the Republican party is worse. Conservatives have a similar problem in that no matter how righteously ticked-off they get, at the end of the day the choice is between voting for Bush in 2004 or not voting at all. Despite what a few folks have declared to me, very few conservatives are going to cast a vote for Dean, Gephardt, or Clark over Bush come the election. That would be like trying to get rid of Willie Brown in San Francisco by voting for Castro. Or maybe it wouldn't, but you get the point, I'm sure.
Anyway, I'm not furious about the president's plan. In fact, I think he should be commended to a certain extent for even going at it. He may not always follow through in time, but this president has an almost unprecedented knack for proposing to actually fix problems (Iraq, Social Security) instead of just throwing new coats of paint on condemned buildings. Immigration is such an unholy mess, to propose fixing it at all is like agreeing to fix a big wood chipper by sticking your arm into it while all the parts are still moving.
And that's my basic point of departure from my fellow conservatives. Everyone can agree that this is a problem George Bush inherited. He didn't invite the eight million illegals currently working in the United States. He didn't give them jobs, and he didn't write the years of misguided policies and laws which have managed to tie the issue into a massive knot. He was presented with facts on the ground. To me, it's actually a bit like the gay-marriage issue. Conservatives very often talk about homosexuality as if it were a problem coming down the pike rather than something that's been here for decades or centuries. If you start from the premise that, for the foreseeable future, gays aren't going anywhere — that they are going to continue to do their thing, live their lives, form their relationships, go to their jobs, make their political demands your policy options — legal or cultural — become extremely limited. You may oppose gay marriage — as I do — but you still need to answer the question of what should be done about gays. Because saying nothing will only result in your having nothing to do with the answer. Same goes for saying they should just keep to themselves or disappear from the radar screen. You have to talk about things inside the realm of the possible.
It's been difficult to find conservatives who've been willing to discuss the immigration issue within the realm of the possible in the last 48 hours. They exist, of course. Ramesh Ponnuru's excellent 2001 NR article on immigration was titled "Minding the 'Golden Door': Toward a Restrictionism that can Succeed" for precisely the reason I'm getting at. Too many conservatives want to discuss the "ought" of immigration without heeding the "is."
Once you accept that these eight million illegals are here and that — contrary to dreams of a few on the far right — there's no way we're going to be able to bounce them out of the country en masse, your spectrum of policy options shrinks mightily. The majority of these folks have jobs here. Suddenly yanking them from their jobs isn't a realistic option. Even less realistic is the expectation that an already overextended government could do it even if it wanted to. And even less realistic than that is the notion that any politician would ever try.
So Bush is tackling the issue as he finds it. Generally, his approach has quite a few merits (though who knows whether they'll still be there after this wends its way through Congress).
And, yes, of course there are aspects of Bush's plan which really stick in my craw. He swears this isn't an amnesty, but of course it is. Those people here illegally will, under Bush's proposal, be able to stay here legally by saying a few bureaucratic abracadabras and — maybe — paying a fine. How is that not amnesty? The best you could say about his proposal is that it's "amnesty lite." But whatever you call it, it's indisputably unfair to the millions of people who don't want to be line-jumpers and are hence willing to play by the rules to get in here.
Another problem is that, as David Frum noted, Bush's proposals were originally supposed to be concessions in a larger agreement with Mexico. Our neighbors to the south were supposed to liberalize their economy and get with the program in terms of policing the border in exchange for all of this. A more prosperous Mexico is still the only guaranteed way of permanently reducing the flow of illegal immigrants from that country. And not just illegal Mexican immigrants. If Mexico were rich, the apparatus for bringing in non-Mexican immigrants would be dismantled. Regardless, now Bush's proposals are unilateral because he's thinking about domestic politics as much as anything else.
I've long been an apostate on immigration around NR. I'm one of those guys who probably would agree to open the borders if there were a) no welfare state and b) a nationwide consensus on the importance of assimilation. But one of the things that Ramesh and Rich and the others have convinced me of is that not all immigration is alike. Some immigrants are better than others, and some immigrants pose different problems than others. Much of the argument about immigration in this country is really an argument about Mexico. The comparisons to previous waves of immigration from Southern or Eastern Europe fail to take into account that Italy doesn't share a huge border with the United States, or that the president of Italy didn't try to influence the votes of its co-nationals in America, or that or that Italians assimilated during a freeze in immigration. Such comparisons also ignore the fact that we've got a huge social safety net as well as a network of activists dedicated to the proposition that immigrants are members of a victim caste deserving of huge transfers of American wealth. Many immigrants used to come here and then go home because they couldn't hack it in the U.S. Now, if they stumble, there's some activist lawyer with a pre-printed lawsuit ready for them to sign.
Anyway, I bring this up simply to say that I really do understand the messiness and the passions around the issue.
I also recognize that crass political concerns are at play here too. In 2001 Matthew Dowd, Bush's pollster, told the Washington Post that if the exact same percentages of Latinos voted for Bush in 2004 as did in 2000, Bush would lose (I'm not sure that's still the case given the recent reallocation of electoral votes). One has always gotten the sense that Bush wants to bring Hispanics into the Republican fold the way FDR brought blacks into the Democratic camp.
But again, there's that pesky issue of facts on the ground. If Dowd is correct, then what would practical conservatives have Bush do? Ignore this reality entirely? If you have a reasonable understanding of the symbiotic relationship between the GOP and the conservative movement, you at least have to appreciate the president's position. If Democrats win the Hispanic vote for generations, the GOP will never become a majority party, which means nothing conservative will ever get done. So Bush has to do something. It's also just as apparent that doing almost anything is better than the current mess. The problem is that doing something actually confirms a reality many conservatives would rather deny.
I am sure I will spend the next few days hearing my friends deny it in my e-mail box. |
