Immigration Debate

Last night President Bush tried to put a stop to the damage his fellow Republicans are doing to the Rove strategy of turning millions of hispanic Catholics into reliable Republican votes. The President sees nothing wrong with illegal immigration. He dealt with them as Texas governor by doing nothing. But there has always been a virulent strain of anti-immigration fever in the Republican Party and recently is has grown stronger. This is, after all, a desperate party in search of a winning, if imaginary, issue.

Bush proposed putting National Guard troops at the border. Send in the troops is a favorite Bush solution to imaginary problems. It makes him look strong and Presidential. Never mind that the President has cut funding for the border patrol in his budgets.

Conservative New York Times Columnist John Tierney had the best take this morning on Bush's response to the illegal immigration issue:

He had to throw in the tough border talk and the new ID cards. He had to deal with the new outbreak of xenophobia, the fear that has always been easy for demagogues to arouse because it's such a basic human instinct.

Distrusting foreigners made evolutionary sense when outside clans threatened to bring in disease and encroach on hunting grounds. It made sense during the thousands of years when towns built walls to stop invaders from plundering their wealth and enslaving their inhabitants.

But the immigrants now coming across the Mexican border do not want to sack our cities. They're not about to pillage our granaries or march home with Americans in chains. They just want to mow our lawns and clean our offices.

They're coming to feed us, not take our food, yet we're demanding that our leaders keep them out. No foreign busboys! No Mexican cooks! Stop them before they grill again!