Rational, emotional trying to coexist
President Dubya’s call for troops on the border Monday night framed one of the most difficult issues regarding immigration.
What to do with the charged atmosphere.
He encouraged us to find the “rationale middle ground” — which I applaud — in a highly emotional arena.
Weighing rational and emotional will be key. The president believes, as I do, that there is rationale middle ground among the details that remain to be worked out.
Rational either invites to change or weeds out those at the fringe of debate, those for whom this is all about race or those who believe we can go on indefinitely without some reform or those who believe it is a simple matter to determine someone’s citizenship or those who believe that the border is working.
It is not.
No reasonable person can argue that our borders are not both porous and currently difficult to make otherwise. A wall or a fence will change the landscape, but I’m skeptical about its return. Troops may make headlines but adding agents is the key. Bush said he has added agents, which is true, but a request for more was met with cold water.
According to Calvin Woodward of AP, Bush’s budget last year only requested 200 more agents when a 2004 immigration law set the requirement at 2,000.
Bush was right too when he said we sent back 6 million but, according to Woodward, the overall number of aliens caught dropped three years in a row until 2004 and has never been as high as the 1.6 million nabbed in 2000, the year before he took office.
Still, the president is doing the right thing by pushing the debate and urging it to be reasonable. His pleas for keeping politics out of the debate notwithstanding, we need to do the right thing at the right time for the right reasons and leave expediency for PACs and talk shows.
Securing our borders has to be in combination with other “rational” parts of immigration reform. Stemming more illegal immigration can only go so far. The president wagged a metaphorical finger in our faces when he said it was unwise and unrealistic to think we could send all the illegals aliens home.
True, but it was an economic finger too, as a number of states’ economies are bolstered through cheap labor provided by undocumented workers.
And any plan with some teeth for employers hiring undocumented workers is only as good as a way to determine a worker’s status. Add to that the endless maze toward gaining citizenship and the government all but giving up on determining who is legal and who is not. Hence Bush’s caution of a reality check.
I read a piece recently about a Hispanic activist in California who said illegal workers should be given a choice of punishment: Pay a $2,000 fine or be sent home. She said that a financial consequence, which fits within Bush’s unwise and inefficient framework, will punish those here illegally. It may also set in motion the possibility of citizenship.
Of course for all that to happen many puzzle pieces would have to be in place, including a border that is secure and maintained that way and a naturalization process that works.