By Ezra
I don't say this often, But John Tierney nailed it today:
Suppose you were setting immigration policy from behind that veil of ignorance. Which of these would you choose?
(1) Restricting immigration to protect some of the lower-paid workers in America from a decline in wages that would be no more than 8 percent, if it occurred at all.
(2) Expanding immigration to benefit most Americans while also giving some non-Americans living in dire poverty the chance to quadruple their income.
You don't need to slog through "A Theory of Justice" to figure out this one.
I was thinking a bit about this while watching Larry King last night. The show featured wall-to-wall coverage of the May Day rallies with continuous commentary by a panel of Lou Dobbs, smiling beatifically; Dana Rohrabacher, who was unsuccessfully trying to hide the crazy; Bill Richardson, whose jowls could be used to smuggle immigrant families across the border; and Janet Murgala, president of the National Council of La Raza. What struck me throughout the broadcast was the pains Rohrabacher and Dobbs took to qualify every statement with a paean to the goodness and virtue of the immigrants in question. Hard-working folks, good, kind and honorable, too. Indeed, some of the best people you'll ever meet. Now let's put 'em on a bus.
The reason I'm relatively sanguine about the outcome of this debate is that the anti-immigrant forces are chained to some very tough rhetoric. The essence of "American" has never been geography, rarely do politicians wax rhapsodic over the quirk of fate that saw them born in San Diego rather than five miles further south. Instead, we've always prided ourselves on comprising a collection of transcendent characteristics, characteristics which allowed us to emerge a global nation, easily able to incorporate all those who would seek to share our values.
In this debate, however, the poor Mexicans who undergo a dangerous trek so they can work agonizingly hard for very little, and do all of it to guarantee their children a better life, are such quintessential expressions of American ideals that it's impossible to exclude them from the more metaphysical description of citizenship. So, instead, folks like Rohrabacher are being forced to redefine "American", making it nothing but an accident of geography, divorcing it from everything that has made our citizenship so much more than a mere statement of birthplace. And that, I think, is going to prove a pretty hard sell.
