It is not easy to finish the series on immigration when the country has had the week it has. But surprisingly, the two may be connected.
They both are about two groups of people – us and them.
The them are people different from us, in this case the “them” are immigrants.
These are people leaving their homeland seeking a better life somewhere else. In many instances they have no safe place to be in their own country, no food, no shelter, no medical care, no work. They come here because of the nation we are. We symbolize a second chance.
Here’s why who they are matters to us – because at the basic level of being human they are us.
We are a nation of immigrants. If you are not native American, then you come from an immigrant family. If there is any nation on earth that should have sympathy and empathy for the world’s immigrants, it is us.
To be anti-immigration means to be against yourself, against your own family, against your own heritage.
When I hear someone talk about immigrants who are sneaking into the country to take jobs away from “real” Americans, I hear the words of someone who is either ignorant of American history or is the ugly American that makes the rest of the world hate us.
An anti-immigration attitude doesn’t represent what is good about our country, its generous spirit, its tradition of freedom, its opportunity to make a new start and build a new life, its hope of being a shining light in an often dark world.
Those are the qualities that we need to guide the nation in immigration reform. It’s something we have been doing since the first immigration law was passed called the Naturalization Act of 1790. Since then laws have been passed, repealed, passed again, regulations revised and re-revised.
Beyond having laws is enforcing them. That’s when things really get hard. Immigration enforcement through the years has been effective and ineffective, and always in a constant state of flux because of technology and funding.
The issue of enforcement is where the approximately 12 million people living here illegally come in. What are we going to do about them?
The answer is an easy one: We adopt a path to citizenship based on the various proposals already on the table. This path will include either sending criminals back to where they came from or putting them in jail.
The proposals are there. A few years ago we came very close to enacting a good and decent proposal, but politicians got cold feet. Somebody falsely called reform “amnesty” and conservatives went off the deep end.
It wasn’t amnesty. It was reality. Sending everyone back who is already here, some having been here for a generation, is not only a stupid idea, it is impractical. You can’t just put people on a boat and send them out to sea.
The only sensible approach is to adopt an orderly, careful review process that allows people here illegally to apply for citizenship.
Frankly, that’s the easy part, relatively speaking. Much harder is finding the will to do it.
That speaks volumes about the kind of people we have become as a nation, and that is the point at which what happened this past week connects with the issue of immigration.
Just as immigration is ultimately about what kind of people we are, so is finding a way to stop killing one another. And just as there is no lack of ideas about what to do about immigration, there is no lack of ideas about how to approach the problem of violence against one another.
But there is a lack of will (in both cases).
Until we accept the fact that the way to stop killing each other will necessarily and absolutely mean reaching across the table of opposing views to find a compromise solution, nothing is going to change.
That means certain people cannot be allowed into the nation’s decision making room. Ideologues cannot get into the room. “My way or the highway” people cannot get into the room. “I want to score political points” people cannot get into the room.
The only people who can get into the room are those who want things to change and are willing to do whatever it takes to make that happen.
This is a nation of great minds and generous hearts. We hold the key to solving the twin problems of immigration and killing one another.
It’s time for the majority of us who value both great minds and generous hearts to tell those who don’t to step aside. They cannot have their country back because it was never theirs to begin with.
It belongs to all of us. We are the United States of America.
Our hope lies in our collective will to start acting like it.
linnposts.com 
I’ve enjoyed this 3 part series, Jan, because it fits in with a much larger scale dilemma for both our society and the world; the emerging authoritarian governing model replacement of democracy. The dominant minority and elites here and abroad have chosen to disregard messy and inclusive democratic principles which recognize various “others” in favor of a divisive and self aggrandizing agenda which elevates only a materialistic, egocentric, technocratic aristocracy which delegitimizes all views beyond their own. David Brooks wrote a piece for the NY Times in February titled The Governing Cancer Of Our Times wherein he discusses this phenomena succinctly but clearly. I just read a piece by Chris Hedges on TruthDig wherein he states emphatically that neoliberalism threatens the entire world and believes we are in the fomenting stages, here and abroad, of a revolution; that, generally, we (ordinary citizens) recognize governments no longer function as democracies and must be replaced but have not yet determined or codified the replacement model necessary to galvanize populations for solidarity in forcing the implementation of such. He also acknowledges that the controlling right could well win against the pushback and create ever increasingly enslaved police states across America and Europe. Aside from population control global depopulation is another huge driving but unspoken agenda among some high elites. The entire world would be the ultimate hegemonic objective of such thinking. We and NATO are current surrounding Russia with nuclear weapons under the guise of defending Europe from its “westward push” but which are quickly convertible to first strike capability. Dr. Paul Craig Roberts and others consider this imminently dangerous because Russia sees what the US is doing and how Europe is simply going along with whatever the US says; that dialog has been unable to take root or stem the threat. They could, if they think there homeland is in inevitable jeopardy, carry out an unthinkable first strike of there own. Roberts fears the apparent neoconservative mindset in DC has discarded MAD concerns due to the deployment of “small” nuclear devices making a nuclear war winnable!? This is lethal hubris! The Cuban Missile Crises started with the US deploying missiles in Turkey. Here we go again but without the wisdom of a Kennedy at the helm. Anyway, immigrants and all “others” world wide are the targets of this way of thinking. It is truly monstrous at its worst manifestations because it means the few consider some lives as unworthy lives. It needs to be quashed! Perhaps billions of lives depend on it! Thank you for raising awareness.
Thanks, Bob. You paint a dismal picture of the world, and I am afraid you and those you quote may be spot on in your assessment. What you said at the end about no wise leadership is the critical factor in my judgment. We simply do not have leaders here or around the world who are statesmen (or statewomen) as we once did. That makes what is going on all the more dangerous.