The New Confederacy
You would think, wouldn’t you, I would, that these four U.S. Senators, three Republicans and one Democrat, all from the South, and all from the (former) Confederacy, that they would not be leading the charge against the 11 million illegal immigrants, that we are told are currently in the country. (One wonders how they were counted? Do you know? Send me an email and let me know.)
Perhaps putting people down is something these Senators have inherited from their slave owning ancestors? The number of illegals happens to be three times that of the slaves in the South at the start of the War Between the States. Perhaps the illegals represent for these Senators a serious threat, as the freed slaves in earlier times, to their (our) way of life?
In any case these Southern Senators are leading the charge against the illegals, in particular, as I read in today’s N Y Times, by their diabolical anti-immigrant amendments to the Immigration Bill currently being debated in the Senate.
Republican Senator from Missouri Christopher Bond’s amendment would have barred illegal immigrants from eventual citizenship. Not too different from their predecessor’s efforts to bar freed Blacks (and women) from voting. People you’re afraid of, people you don’t understand, you keep them out.
Republican Senator from Texas Kay Bailey Hutchison’s amendment would have required that illegal immigrants return to their home countries before they could obtain even temporary legal status. Diabolical is the right word for that one.
A bit more palatable is the amendment of Senator Jim Webb, Democrat from Virginia. This would permit only those immigrants who have been in the country at least four years to be eligible for eventual legal status. What does that mean? Four years of illegality is better than just one year or two?
Delaying tactics were the weapon of choice of yet another of the Southern critics of the Immigration Bill. Republican Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina insisted on a full reading on the Senate floor of all 27 amendments. After about one hour of this the Senators who were present revolted and brought the reading to an end, promising hard copies of the amendments to all for homework that night.
I don’t know whether Republican Senator from Alabama, Jeff Sessions, was also the author of an anti-immigrant amendment, but this man from the Deep South announced that he “continued to be “flabbergasted and amazed” that people think the bill (which would put the illegals on a track to citizenship) would work. Instead, he said, it would bring a new flood of illegal immigrants.
There are those among us who would like nothing better than a new flood (illegal because that’s the only way they can get here) of immigrants. It would mean that our country is still the destination of choice for millions of the dispossessed throughout the world.
And that’s good, especially when there are so many who speak bad of our country. It’s a good thing, both for those who want to come here, and for us who are already here and have so much to gain from those coming.
The illegality of the eleven million is not what is most important. What is important is that these people have come here at great risk to themselves, and for the most part by doing so have shown admirable qualities, strength and courage among others. Can our country ever have too many of these kinds of people?
What is important is that the “illegals” have come here to work and thereby help themselves, their families, and the country, America, that, unlike the government, does need them and does have a place for them.
I’ve rarely had a good word to say about our President. His conduct of the Iraq War ought to lay him open to impeachment proceedings. But immigration is one thing he got right. Why is that so?
Well we learn why from an article in the NYTimes of last week: We learn that, “the roots of Mr. Bush’s passion [to help the illegals obtain citizenship] lie in Midland, Texas, now heavily Hispanic, the city where Mr. Bush spent much of his childhood and to which he returned as a young adult after spending his high school and college years [at Andover and Yale].”
Mr. Bust, the reporter says, "developed a particular empathy for the new Mexican immigrants who worked hard on farms, in oil fields and in people’s homes and went on to raise children who built businesses and raised families of their own, without the advantages he had as the scion of a wealthy New England family.”
This is the sort of wisdom that one acquires from living and working closely with all kinds of people, with people clearly unlike oneself. We used to learn this in the public schools when the economic, ethnic, and racial separations were not so pronounced; perhaps there was a period like this just after WWII. Perhaps we learned it best of all when we had the military draft, and the average patrol represented all of America.
George Bush learned it by living and working among a poor, Latino population in Midland, Texas, both as a boy and as an oilman. Unfortunately that now seems to be all that he learned. Would that fellow Texan Kay Bailey Hutchinson, and fellow Southerners, Christopher Bond, Jim Webb, Jim DeMint and Jeff Sessions had also learned it. If so the U. S. Senate might now be doing the right thing.
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