Colorado Rep Tom Tancredo, Republican presidential candidate and illegal-immigration pitbull, called on the nation’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to crash a Capitol Hill press conference held by Sen Dick Durban yesterday. Three immigrant students were to appear at the event in support of Durbin’s proposed Dream Act legislation, which grants illegal-immigrant kids (not yet 16) provisional status to go to college or into the military. Tancredo demanded the students be snatched from the podium and deported, arguing to reporters rhetorically that “if we can’t enforce our laws inside the building where they are made, where can we enforce them?!” Turns out of course we can’t enforce the laws, even at Tancredo’s place of business. Tancredo’s favorite federal agency said it had received his message but decided not to act on it, and Sen Durbin, shocked and dismayed, decried Tancredo’s political bullying tactics.
Meantime, Candidate Tancredo seems to be making almost no hay with his anti-illegal-immigration presidential platform, despite the fireworks he sets off here and there around the nation, wherever dubious residents may be lurking. His target is oddly elusive. We know who they are, the illegals. They’re everywhere and nowhere. They’re taking jobs and speaking Spanish and other non-patriotic languages. They’re running up healthcare bills. They’re crashing our public schools. They’re the problem.
Yet they’re always winning. They have no lawyers, really, no official leg to stand on. There is no pro-illegal-immigration candidate for president. But Tancredo will never defeat them. They’re not going anywhere. They’re standing up and speaking at press conferences under Tancredo’s nose and there’s not a damned thing he can do about it. What is going on?
The illegal-immigration debate is not a debate, that’s what. It is a platform to sound off, to rail against legitimate ills in a way that will offend and place blame only on those without any power to rail back. Tancredo’s “Captain America battling the forces of evil” fantasies are comic. Neither he nor anyone else is going to defeat illegal immigration. Tancredo’s “forces of evil” are winning and they’re going to keep on winning. The immigration debate, if it is to be called that, should be about how to leverage illegal immigration to best effect. Fact is, the current nonpolicy works very well for American business, otherwise the nonpolicy would not exist. What true-blue freedom-loving USA employer doesn’t revel in the long hours, low wages, nonbenefits that characterize our free-market illegal-immigration economy?
Most telling is that US business doesn’t seem too concerned with Tancredo’s ravings. Employers, board members, managers, investors all see it for what it is: flashy entertainment that will end soon enough and let us all get back to business as usual.
It seems to me that we already have a pro-illegal-immigration president, and I suspect most of the candidates will act in a similar fashion.
If you’re wondering why “they” keep winning you stumbled across the answer when you brought up US business. It is US business that has most successfully lobbied to have immigration laws essentially ignored when it benefits their interests. Heck, it’s almost as good as slave labor. Can you blame them? If illegal immigrants could somehow be protected and given the same rights as US workers you can bet that US business will stop lobbying against immigration enforcement and there would be a huge decrease in illegal immigration.
What’s especially funny (or tragic) is that most on the left are myopically pro-illegal-immigration because they care for the immigrants, playing right into the hands of business. In the meantime, it’s the US middle class that is getting severely hurt as wages are driven down and the gap between rich and poor gets wider and wider. Yes, we’ve always had illegal immigration but it’s now happening on a scale that is unprecedented in US history. You can’t logically care about the middle class in the US and also be in favor of not enforcing US immigration laws. The latter destroys the former.
Hey CV! I wasn’t wondering why “they” keep winning and I didn’t stumble across anything! I was attempting to underline the absurdity of the debate which makes a muddle of the reality. What we got is what works (for business) and that’s why Bush supports the status quo. As you say, it don’t work so great for any of the people involved– not the US (documented) work force and not the (undocumented) immigrants, who live in a rightless limbo at the whim of their “employers” and men like Tancredo, who is right to make immigration an issue. He just seems to not want to really understand it!
I confess I’m having a difficult time spotting your sarcasm. Perhaps I know too many people who say exactly the same thing but mean every word of it. Perhaps I’m getting daft. When you wrote “There is no pro-illegal-immigration candidate for president,” were you being sarcastic of serious?
In any case, I do disagree with you about the proper subject of the debate. Leveraging illegal immigration should certainly be a part of it, but more important is whether we prefer to have cheap goods and services or a strong middle class. There are serious people who have plausible ideas about controlling illegal immigration, mostly focused on businesses that take advantage of undocumented workers, rather than Gestapo-style raids favored by Tancredo. The fact that illegal immigration cannot be completely stopped doesn’t mean it can’t be reasonably controlled.
People really do talk and think that way I guess was my point. I was being sarcastic on the pro-illegal-immigration president. I mean, candidates may be de facto pro-illegal but none of them is fool enough to actually call themselves pro-illegal– “my position is I’m pro-illegal, both drugs and immigrants!”– or to run on such a platform, even though the idea, now that I’m writing it again here, is really ironically fantastic and would guarantee yes defeat but also surely a softball appearance on the Daily Show! Problem is that, in addition to being honest, which you can’t ever really be as a candidate, the articulation of a pro-illegal platform makes you the candidate supporting lawbreaking and you’d also likely suddenly find yourself approached for support by actual living and breathing illegals, who can’t vote anyway and need help that you don’t want to provide precisely because you’re in favor of them remaining helplessly illegal! So then you would have to further articulate that that’s the part you’re pro about: “As the pro-illegal candidate, I’m not for illegals, I’m for their illegality. I’m the pro-illegality president!”
I agree there can and should be better approaches to the immigration-workforce-and-American-business problem. Which candidate is articulating anything interesting in that area? It sure aint T2.