Friday, April 19, 2013
Let's make the debate about immigration reform, by which we mean it seems mainly 'amnesty' for illegals, let's make it clear what the problem is here for any conservative or any moderate who looks at the immigration policy status quo in the US and says to themselves "ah... this all seems kind of fucked up..." - let's make it clear that the problem here is that no objective observer trusts the Democrats to work against their own interests - everyone understands that the way things are now works to the political benefit of the Democrats - why should anyone believe they're actually gonna work against their own interests and enforce border security, enforce stringent paths to citizenship? You'd have to be a fool to trust these people when it comes to immigration reform. And that's the problem. I'm sure Rubio's intentions are good and his plan deserves a hearing - and I'm certainly willing to entertain notion that some sort of amnesty is the only reasonable way to go here - but I have zero confidence in the Democrats playing nice and serving any interests other than their own on this issue and therefore have a hard time believing it sensible to make any promises whatsoever on what a future amnesty might look like before the border is secured and immigration policy as a whole is depoliticized. Now, sure, you can make the argument that you can't get those two things without first convincing more Hispanics to climb out of the left wing gutter and vote right and that to get there you need to sign off on some kind of amnesty - problem is, I don't buy that argument because I see very little in the mindset of the Hispanic voter that suggests an immanent sympathy for a conservative view of governance and world affairs - yes, I don't see them being as monolithically locked in as African-Americans to nanny state liberalism, but I do see them looking a lot like the Jewish voter in America who, unlike the Jewish voter in Israel, has a pronounced cultural affinity for a left wing view of things [well, of course, generally only when it comes to foreign policy and all things military does the Israeli voter tend right - tends a bit differently when it comes to economic policy].
