"Another day of interviews and calls, and my overwhelming sense is that the
immigration bill as drafted is as dead as dead can be. The president's speech on
Tuesday had the effect of throwing gas on the flames, and the anger has
multiplied, and it isn't nativist in the least.
Could the bill be saved?
Only if the Republican leadership comes back with a package of amendments which
it announces beforehand and insists be voted on serially and all of which must
be adopted if cloture is to be invoked on the final amended version. The choice
before the Democrats is whether they will accept genuine enforcement (the whole
fence first, big hikes in federal law enforcement beyond the Border Patrol, a
burden of proof requirement on non-Spanish speaking immigrants from countries
with jihadist networks and perhaps even for gang-age Spanish speakers etc.) What
happened over the past ten days was a huge shift against the bill so that the
amendment package must be real reform of the reform or the dead end will be
reached. John McCain knew what he was doing when he demanded a jam down --the
bill has lost support with every day of scrutiny."
As a nation I think we stand a long way from an agreement on what we want and expect from immigration. There are people who are afraid of the lose of the American culture, you might call them racists, and some of them might be, but some are just afriad of the unknown. There are people who don't want to see masses of spanish speaking people coming across the border because they fear that what is American, will never be the same. They are right, every new group changes who America is, until now most of the new groups have come from Europe, and even then they were feared.
There are also those who want the workers to be able to work, and then send them home. I think for them the fear is that a flood of low skilled workers coming into America will take away the jobs of Americans. There are a couple points to be made about this. When more people come into a community, it is true that they enter the job market as competitors. What people seem to miss is that they also enter the community in the form of shoppers going to the stores and buying houses. They don't only take jobs, they create jobs as they shop and live.
There is an honest concern for the people who are coming here. When you make it criminal to cross borders, only criminals cross borders. Many of the people who come across the desert face hardships from nature. On top of that they are being used by trafficers to make money, and the migrants have often been harmed by the people they trusted to bring them here. They will abandon them in the middle of the desert alone, steal from them and kill them if it suits their needs. It isn't fair to make people have to engage in this just to do what all of our families did.
Terror is a concern, how do we allow those into the country who are hard workers and want to build up the community and block those who would harm us. The problem is harder when you take into consideration that many of these people come from countries with little of a record keeping system. They may not have the paper work that is standard amond Americans. Is it fair to block someone from entering the country just because they came from a poor village with no hospital. On the other hand these are people who could be hiding who they are. There have been reports of migrants from the middle east using embasies in arab countries to gain access to Latin America and then coming north to the US.
There is even an enviromental issue to be considered. It isn't often talked about but if there were a fence that was built from the gulf to the ocean along the border a number of migratory animals (the nonhumyn kind), would face difficulties. As humyns we forget that there are other animals that live on this planet and we should think about them when we take actions.
This bill is dead, to be honest I didn't like it so I am glad. I have little faith that the nation can find the balance that is dearly needed to bring peace to this issue.
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