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 Since then laws have been passed, repealed, passed again, regulations revised and re-revised.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.
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