Letter 2 America for July 2, 2013

Dear America,

Immigration reform is at the top of the news again as a one thousand page bill passed by a margin of 68-32 in the Senate.  As you might have guessed, the nay sayers were all conservative Republicans.  But oddly, there is a cadre of unusual suspects importuning them to change their minds, starting with Evangelicals.  They seem to realize what the Republican Party as a whole realizes regarding the immigrant population...at least to the extent that it is Latino.  We are headed toward a non-white-majority--a minority majority as I heard it put Sunday--demographic nationally, and the Hispanic component of that demographic may well be the determining factor as to who survives in both political and religious circles.  Evangelical leaders are eager for immigration reform toward the end of filling pews as American youth seems to be less interested in organized religion than its progenitors were.  And right beside them in the importunate choir is the business community.

On the ABC Sunday morning news program "This Week," one of the panelists was a congresswoman who pointed out that legalizing the currently-illegal immigrant population represents a $200 billion chunk of the economy, presumably by virtue of both what they produce and what they consume, not to mention the services they perform.  Business--the primary Republican constituency in whose interests supply-side economics was created--is clamoring to make legal those who are now essential to the success of or economic recovery in more ways than one rather than allowing the Republicans to find a new way to expel them, and their money, from the country.  They may be aliens in the legal sense, but they are all-American when it comes to the dollars they earn and spend, and this is the business community's way of saying to them, "The Waltons want you...never mind Uncle Sam."  Meanwhile, the liberal component of the electorate makes it clear in every poll that it wants immigration reform that provides a "pathway to citizenship" for the illegal alien population, thus completing a force able to administer the electoral coup d' grace for which the Republican Party has seemingly been pining for the past six years or so.

So now the bill goes to the House of Representatives, where last week Congressman Gowdy of the House Oversight Committee--a prematurely gray would-be bully with a tendency to feign profundity with trite phrases and contrived indignation--bellowed like a stuck pig over the claim that an IRS employee now on administrative leave waived her fifth amendment rights when she refused to testify out of fear of mindless prosecution in the name of political narcissism, even though no one else cares these days.  And the huzzahs from Republican committee members demonstrate that like Gowdy, the Republicans in The House have their foot shooting pistol fully loaded and they are taking careful aim at their collective big toe.  It seems that self-destruction is the new conservatism, and it's all the rage in congress, and that's not a bad thing if you are an old sixties radical like me, but immigration reform seems to me to be too big a price for Republicans to pay for the internecine conflict within the already moribund party.  Something has to be done about the huge component of our labor force that is essential in various businesses and industries, not to mention all of our markets.  I said years ago when immigration reform last came up during the Bush administration that we have to reconcile ourselves to the fact that there are only two choices.  One is to bring those people on whom we rely into our society and legitimize our reliance on them, and the other is to send them home and find another way to fill the void they will leave behind.  There is a moral issue in my mind, but in today's politics morality seems to have nothing to do with anything.  The practical reality however is something that even conservatives understand...especially those in business.  Money talks, and the illegal immigrant population in this country--eleven million of them at the moment--speaks very loudly.

What the Republicans face is this.  Their procrustean hard-core minority is intransigent on various elements of immigration reform, though they claim to favor it overall.  They insist on fortification of the border--and The Senate's bill includes it so the issue is largely dealt with in terms of the need for bipartisan support in order to pass something--and they reject categorically a path to citizenship for illegal aliens; I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions as to the reason, though when you are making your choice you probably shouldn't exclude bigotry and winning elections that minority votes are most likely to tip in what they think is the wrong direction.  On the other hand, the votes on which the Republicans have traditionally relied--those of conservative "family values" types and those of the proprietors of businesses, not to mention the money that they have provided for Republican campaign purposes over recent decades--are quite plainly arraying themselves in favor of immigration reform, including legalization of some kind.  So they have to consider which votes they not only want, but need.  They can keep in their caucuses the votes of the likes of Congressman Trey Gowdy and Senator Ted Cruz, which seem to vitiate every Republican initiative that even verges on moderation these days, or they can throw those guys to the wolves and create a more moderate conservatism that a majority of Americans can accept.  But they can't have it both ways.  We are on the cusp of one of two things.  Either the Republican Party will be re-consigned to that political nether land from which they only recently emerged after decades of Democrat controlled congresses, or they will confront their own dysfunction and do something about it, which ultimately will probably require undoing the gerrymandering that they have indulged in when the next census is done in seven years in the states in which they control the legislatures.  Rigging elections so that only nationally unpopular ideologies can succeed locally is now demonstrated to be inimical to political success for the party...either party.  So between that and ending the filibuster, it may be that solutions to our political problems are on the horizon.  Let's just hope that our politicians can see that far.

Your friend,

Mike