| Sadly, the right is celebrating the defeat of the immigration bill. There was a lot in the bill to dislike. But it's death is not worth celebrating.
Today, 12 million undocumented workers live in the shadows of the U.S. -- trying to escape detection and deportation. That combination of facts makes them an easy population to exploit. That, in turn, means marked downward pressure on wages in industries with lots of undocumented workers.
During the debate over this bill, Senators Tester and Baucus voted wrong. Repeatedly. They both voted to require police to turn over crime victims who they discovered were present illegally -- a quick way to avoid discovering rapists and murderers if key witnesses are worried about deportation.
These sorts of bad ideas were brought up repeatedly. Other amendments would require doctors and hospitals to turn over undocumented patients for deportation. Given public health concerns and the likelihood of a massive flu outbreak (or some other epidemic) soon, does it really make sense to scare sick people away from medicine?
The problem with the immigration debate is a lot like the problem with the abortion debate. Some people are so caught up in the individual actions that they simply don't care how the public policy will actually work as long as it reflects their moral beliefs. Nevermind that anti-choice policies have tended to increase abortion rates worldwide. Nevermind that abstinence-only sex education has led in somes cases to higher pregnancy and STD transmission rates. And nevermind that cracking down on the border and implementing punitive measures against immigrants has never worked to stop the flow of migration before. The mindset is simple: If it feels good to pass a bill, do it. And damn the actual consequences.
I've written here before that one of the most disheartening things during the immigration debate was to witness Tester and Baucus referring to these immigrants as "illegal aliens," a term loaded to sound as vicious as possible. Regardless of what else one might think of the policy, the people most directly impacted are still human -- and using the rhetoric of minutemen and other vigilantes who seek to threaten and harm Hispanic immigrants, sometimes without regard to their legal status.
As someone blessed by my birth to be a citizen of the United States, I have a tough time being so damn vindictive toward people who dream of attaining what I had simply for being born in the right place to the right parents. That's not to say that there aren't problems associated with immigration that we should try to fix, but the hatefulness and the knee-jerk reactions are simply unnecessary. |
