Sex scandals, money scandals, incompetence and insanity have come to define today's Republican Party. But, amazingly, Republicans seem eager to ensure the Democrats as a governing majority far into future.
Immigration has become the all-consuming domestic political football for crowds of angry reactionaries. Lou Dobbs and Tom Tancredo echo their ideological forbearers Strom Thurmond and George Wallace, stirring their legions into fits of bigotry. In all of its manifestations, the anti-immigrant zeal sweeping America is far more dangerous than the hard working immigrants who remind us why the United States is so great.
The ugly emotions evoked by this summer's immigration debate continue to poison the political atmosphere. John McCain saw his presidential campaign collapse after stirring the wrath of border zealots. Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani are consumed in a nasty spat over, it seems, who grins wider when persecuting would-be American citizens. Despite George W. Bush's half-hearted resistance, the Republican Party has effectively added a neon seal to their "Whites Only" banner.
Where reason prevails, one can make out the basic framework of equitable reform. A far greater crime than crossing an arbitrary desert line in pursuit of America's great promise is tearing a nursing baby from her undocumented mother. Pro-family politicians should save their moral outrage for each time a family is ripped apart by immigration authorities rationing rights sometimes only on the basis of skin color.
While California crops rot and construction companies fret over disappearing laborers, economic populists should recognize immigrants as allies in organizing and lobbying for livable wages and safe working conditions. Contrary to the occasional caricature, immigrants are not fleecing our social services. Despite paying the same consumption taxes - and often payroll taxes - undocumented immigrants do not receive, among other benefits, Social Security checks (contributing to the program's solvency as baby boomers retire).
After excoriating immigrants, towns across the country have come to miss the hard workers and faithful families that were driven away. In September, the New York Times chronicled the story of Riverside, N.J., a factory town with an aching economy after passing a stringent ordinance banning immigrants from housing and employment in the town.
Border town vigilantes or fences or walls will not impede the march of globalization. But as the cross-border stream of labor slows to a trickle, the complaints of "job-stealing immigrants" will be undermined as whole companies relocate south of the border. The choice was easy for Steve Scaroni, a California lettuce farmer who did just that. "I'm as American red-blood as it gets," he told The New York Times, "but I'm tired of fighting the fight on the immigration issue."
Before running for president, Rudy Giuliani understood that welcoming immigrants is common sense. In 1996, he blasted the anti-immigrant movement for endangering "the single most important reason for American greatness - namely, the renewal, reformation and reawakening that's provided by the continuous flow of immigrants." Now he's reduced to bemoaning the specter of "amnesty."
Mike Huckabee is starting to get it. Recognizing the devastation children so often bear from overly harsh immigration policies, he said recently, "If ... the federal government is so incompetent that it fails to secure the border, you don't then grind your heel into the face of a 6-year-old child over it. That's not what this country does. We're a better country than that."
I hope we are.
Jacob Shelly is a junior in the School of Public Affairs and a liberal columnist for The Eagle.
