A Fractious Debate

Bush may finally have found an issue the Republicans can use to divert some attention from their self-engineered debacle in Iraq, immigration. Two hundred thousand protested reform in Los Angeles. Here in Denver we had some thousands protesting the new plan to reform immigration.

They want to make it a criminal offense to help an illegal alien. Shall doctors, then, or first responders ask for a green card before helping an accident victim? If I help someone change their tires on the side of the interstate, should I be put in prison, adding to the ten percent of Americans under some form of state control (in prison or on parole). Is it then illegal to help an immigrant baby medically because her parents brought her across the border? This is Republicanism at its best: There's a simple answer for everything, few of which survive contact with reality. Criminalizing giving aid cheapens us as a nation, besides, there are a number of illegals here without their own consent, children. Will we let them starve? Will we let them die without medical care? Will we deny them education? We may as well machine gun them at the border.

Which is not the Bush plan. Bush does not want to stop cheap labor cleaning hotel rooms or keeping greens immaculate nor does he want to stop downward pressure on American wages. Frist wants to stop the flow of cheap labor to build houses and to criminalize those already in the country. Again, Republicanism would say they're here illegally, they should be criminals. Again, this doesn't survive contact with reality: There are too many for us to round up, about twelve million, they came within a system that encourages them to come and they are providing labor for jobs that few Americans would take, at least, not at the wages offered the illegals. Frist's bill includes no guest worker program nor way to legalize the status of those already here. It's short-sightedness, the same pride that led to his erroneous telediagnosis of Terri Schaivo's condition.

Of course, our own Tommy Tancredo is among the voices that would establish machine gun nests at the border and concentration camps as a prelude to deportation. Tom, you're consistent. Consistently wrong and consistently narrow-minded but consistent. Without an amnesty program and more importantly, without helping the economies of the countries providing us cheap labor at home, immigration reform will only serve to divert national attention from Iraq.

Which just may be the Republican strategy behind it.