GOP To the Tempest-Tossed, Yearning to Breathe Free: Drop Dead
While the President is committed to the war in Iraq, and arguing that spending more than $80 billion to train terrorists in Iraq is somehow valuable to our national security, Republicans around the country are grasping at straws to find another issue. Well, not straws, actually. They're grasping at xenophobia. At racism. At discrimination. If there is one thing our nation’s history proves, it is the absolute dependence of America's success on the contributions of recent immigrants. We long since ceased to be a frontier country. It is our newest citizens that provide the spirit of limitless possibilities; it is they that most wholeheartedly embrace the American Dream.
Republicans have decided they are against immigrants. Oh, they're against illegal immigration, but they're not so fond of the legal ones, either. Republicans are lining up to offer solutions to the problem of illegal immigration. Proposals range from a fence between Mexico and America to a wall--the Great Wall of America--a wall that would be so long that the naked eye could see it from space; to setting a large portion of our Army on the Mexican border. Which, of course, would mean we would have to withdraw from Iraq to protect our nation from people who want to steal our...minimum wage jobs? That would only lead to more illegal immigrants coming here by water, which would mean setting the Navy and Coast Guard to battle against people on leaky rafts.
We could never be involved in a foreign military adventure again, not without making the border porous, and allowing the illegal immigrants to come in again. But many of your Republicans who are advocating setting the Army to deal with the illegal immigration problem say they are doing so in the name of... national security. Nonsense, of course. And if you don't think racism is a part of all this, a feeling that there are too many Hispanics in this country already, a feeling there are too many people speaking in a foreign language, well: Find me the Republican office-holder who is arguing that the way to decrease illegal immigration is to make it easier to legally immigrate; they are very rare, indeed.
No one, I think, is arguing that there is anything wrong with foreigners wanting to live in America, to willingly join our nation, to become a part of our national destiny. But, quite simply, far more people want to come to America than we are allowing in, and there is no interest in letting those people come here legally. We are a nation of laws. But our draconian immigration laws are making a growing part of the people who live in this country by choice criminals.
Though no one can be sure, we believe more people are entering the country illegally each year than legally immigrate. Republicans are right to spotlight immigration as a real and growing problem. But their solutions is utterly wrong-headed. They offer not just solutions that hate and fear the remaining foreigners who love America. But by attacking immigrants, what they are really attacking is the idea of America itself, which is a nation built by immigrants.
9:48:52 AM 
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