The Hacendado
Why is President Bush risking a nasty battle within his own party over immigration reform?
By Howard Fineman
Newsweek
Updated: 1:56 p.m. ET June 12, 2007
June 12, 2007 - Though I’ve never heard him use the term, my guess is that George W. Bush sees himself as a hacendado, an estate owner in Old Mexico.
That would give him a sense of Southwestern noblesse, duty-bound not just to work “his” people, but to protect them as well.
His advisor, Carlo Rove, has explained that a system called “democracy” now gives peasants something called “the vote.” It would be shrewd, Rove said, for hacendados to grant their workers’ citizenship.
That’s the best explanation I have for why Bush is in the midst of what may be a suicide mission on immigration policy—embarrassing for him and ruinous for his party.
An ungrateful base
Long ago, when he was running for governor, Bush told me that he was a “southwestern” Republican, not a “southern” one. As a son of the southwest, he wants employers to have access to all of that cheap labor, but wants to make the system more orderly, at least not cruel. He hopes (as he did as governor) to get credit for wisdom.
It infuriates Bush when people—in his own party, no less—are not grateful for what he sees as an act of heartfelt, enlightened generosity and foresighted management.
So he sounded like the Texas gunslinger he pretended to be as a kid when he squared off against GOP foes of his sweeping immigration proposal. His timing was perfect, as in wrong, just as he was preparing to attend the Senate Republicans’ weekly luncheon on the Hill. “I’ll see you at the bill signing,” he said, chestier than usual.
He might live to regret such playground bravado. If you are president, the only thing worse than issuing a public threat to your own party is failing to make it stick.
It really is quite extraordinary. Here he is, an unpopular leader fighting an unpopular war. His two-term presidency is clattering to a conclusion, besieged on all sides, taking hits on everything from his attorney general to his general incompetence. And so he decides to do what? Climb into the ring for an ultimate fighting bout with the base of the very Republicans who got him to the White House.
Outrage and concern
As always, conservatives, who thrive on alienation, are spoiling for a fight. Now they have found it. Among the branch of conservatism fixed on “Us v Them” thinking, the enemy for decades was Communism. After the fall of The Wall, the “neocons” found a replacement Them in jihadist Islam. The old America-Firsters—what we used to call “isolationists,” who distrust foreign commitments—now have a homeland Them, in the form of 12-20 million illegal immigrants, most from Mexico.
The domestic neocons want a fence, a big and real one; they want illegals sent packing to the extent possible. Mostly they want leaders to express outrage and concern. And they aren’t a fringe; they form the core of the GOP. That is especially true in the South and parts of the Rustbelt, where the threat of being inundated by immigrants is less immediate, but the sense of estrangement from metropolitan, bi-coastal America great.
Of the more than 100 members of Rep. Tom Tancredo’s Immigration Reform Caucus—which favors a tough, enforcement-oriented policy—only six are from the southwestern swing states at political ground zero: Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Nevada.
Overwhelming campaign opposition
Responding to the GOP base as it is, not as Bush hopes it is, nine of the ten Republican presidential contenders are ardently against Bush’s plan to give a “path to citizenship” to illegals. The 11th—soon-to-be candidate Fred Dalton Thompson—is almost as adamant as Tancredo on the topic. If there is a 12th GOP candidate, that would be Newt Gingrich. He adds a Churchillian sense of urgency and doom to the debate.
As for Bush, he has the Business Roundtable types (with a smattering of fitful union allies) and party strategists—Rove among them—who argue that the GOP has no choice but to hit the reset button on an immigration “system” that was overwhelmed from the moment it was last “reformed” in 1986. The CEO types are no match, in what amounts to a GOP primary, for angry grassroots activists on a crusade.
And they shouldn’t be dismissed as crazies. Bush’s own dark view of post 9/11 clashes with his relatively benign attitude toward illegal immigration.
Here is the question that clash begs:
Do borders mean anything?
Alfred Donovan, a patent lawyer whose blog covers Royal Dutch Shell, takes a look at the largest patent filing in history. Shell thinks they have a sound method for getting top quality oil out of oil shale rock, which would remain profitable as long as oil stayed above $30/barrel. If it works, it would also be better for the environment than conventional drilling.
ReplyDeleteIf they’re right, the US would add a truly vast amount of oil to its reserves. Indeed, the USA accounts for 62% of the world oil shale resources, and USA, Russia and Brazil together account for 86% in terms of shale oil content.
You will notice that Mexico isn't mentioned.
"Do borders mean anything?"
ReplyDelete... Only to extreme radical nationalists like you and me, Deuce! Remember, to the Left and the Right, La Raza members are seen as the new Americans. We "old style" Americans are extreme racists and xenophobes! Don't ever forget it!
Most cynical of all, however, are the moralistic pundits, academics, and journalists who deplore the “nativism” of Americans they consider to be less-educated yokels. Yet their own jobs of writing, commenting, reporting, and teaching are rarely threatened by cheaper illegal workers.
ReplyDeleteFew of these well-paid and highly educated people live in communities altered by huge influxes of illegal aliens. Their professed liberality about illegal immigration usually derives from seeing hardworking waiters, maids, nannies, and gardeners commute to their upscale cities and suburbs to serve them well — and cheaply.
In general, such elites don’t use emergency rooms in the inner cities and rural counties overcrowded by illegal aliens. They don’t drive on country roads frequented by those without licenses, registration and insurance. And their children don’t struggle with school curricula altered to the needs of students who speak only Spanish.
For many professors, politicians, and columnists, the gangs, increased crime, and crowded jails that often result from massive illegal immigration and open borders are not daily concerns, but rather stereotypes hysterically evoked by paranoid and unenlightened others in places like Bakersfield and Laredo.
So, what is the truth on illegal immigration?
Simple. Millions of fair-minded white, African-, Mexican- and Asian-Americans fear that we are not assimilating millions of aliens from south of the border as fast as they are crossing illegally from Mexico.
In the frontline American southwest, entire apartheid communities and enclaves within cities have sprung up whose distinct language, culture and routines are beginning to resemble more the tense divides in the Balkans or Middle East than the traditional melting pot of multiracial America.
Concern over this inevitable slowdown in integration and assimilation is neither racist nor nativist. It grows out of real worry that when millions of impoverished arrive in mass without legality, education, and the ability to speak English, costly social problems follow that will not be offset by the transitory economic benefits cheap wages may provide.
Those fretting about delays in sealing the border along with proposed fast-track visas, millions of new guest workers, and neglect of existing immigration law are neither illiberal nor cynical.
But their self-righteous critics may well be both.