Good riddance.
Rep. Tom Tancredo withdrew from the race for the Republican presidential nomination. As much as I'd love to see as much intra-GOP strife and mudslinging as possible, it's a good thing for America that he never got any real support. Tancredo is a nasty man. He is virulently anti-Muslim (he advocated bombing Mecca). He isn't just anti-immigration, he's anti-immigrant (for example, calling the entire city of Miami a "third world country").
Tancredo ran on a mean-spirited anti-immigrant campaign. I suspect that while immigration has its loud supporters driving the coverage, the support of draconian measures in all but a few places is a mile wide and an inch deep. Most folks recognize that immigrants are people, not just "illegals."
Immigration is a hard issue to talk about without sounding either racist or incredibly naive. On the one hand, every wave of immigration was accompanied by a loud movement claiming that the new crop, unlike the last, could never assimilate. Every time, they're wrong. Startups by foreign-born Americans are driving the economy. Somebody has to pick our fruit and I don't see many American kids looking for a career in menial labor.
On the other hand, the system is clearly broken. Nobody knows precisely how many immigrants are here. Modern technology has made it possible to not understand English for far more types of communication than before. People are shocked by the speed with which their neighborhoods are changing.
One big difference between rich, well-run countries and poor, badly-run ones is the fact that our institutions aren't just empty shells and actually do the work they were set out to do. Flaunting rules on a wide scale shouldn't happen in a place where nearly everyone will wait for a red light in the middle of the night with no other cars in sight. Does that mean that we need to shut it off? No. It means that people should be accounted for, but they shouldn't live in fear of the government for lack of papers like in some sort of totalitarian backwater. Also, too many people have been here for too long to get deported, so there has to be some sort of path to citizenship, whether difficult or easy.
The Lou Dobbs of the world sound like broken records to most people. Eventually, all but the hard core will start ignoring it again.
Leave a comment