PACKET EDITORIAL, April 4
By: Packet Editorial
One needn’t be a bleeding-heart liberal to be thoroughly disgusted by the wave of anti-immigrant sentiment that seems to be sweeping certain parts of the nation these days.
Even here in Princeton, where the school board passed a rather innocuous, non-binding resolution last month urging passage of a law that would allow qualifying children of undocumented immigrants to pay in-state tuition at public colleges and universities, the reaction in some quarters goes beyond simple disagreement. It is gratuitously nasty.
For every angry letter to the editor we’ve run on this subject, for every harsh comment we’ve posted on our Web site, we’ve received many more that are simply unfit to print in any form. They blame immigrants for everything from the sluggish economy to violent crime to lower educational standards to the breakdown of the family. And they draw no distinction, it seems, between those who are undocumented and those who are here legally they’re all stealing jobs from "real" Americans, refusing to learn our language and sucking our entitlement programs dry, and they deserve nothing better than immediate and permanent deportation to their filthy homelands.
There has always been an angry, narrow-minded minority of American citizens who find convenient scapegoats in immigrants. Even in this nation of newcomers, the outbreak of war or the onset of tough economic times has been known to occasion a last-person-in-close-the-door mentality.
But this is different. This isn’t just an impulsive outburst of intolerance arising from simmering economic or political frustration. This is a persistent drumbeat of jingoistic extremism and it is being orchestrated by a pack of demagogues the likes of which have not been seen since the days of a certain junior senator from Wisconsin.
The hallmark of McCarthyism was to blame everything Americans found worrisome on communists, and to promise a brighter future once these enemies of freedom and democracy were not only removed from the State Department and other government agencies they had infiltrated, but driven out of the country. Change communists to immigrants and you pretty much have today’s formula for improving our imperiled way of life, authored perhaps ironically, perhaps not by another Wisconsin politician: James Sensenbrenner.
Rep. Sensenbrenner’s approach embodied in the Border Protection, Antiterrorism and Illegal Immigration Act is a simple one: Round up everyone who’s in this country illegally, deport them, and build a 700-mile fence, the higher the better, along the U.S.-Mexican border. This is the measure that passed the House of Representatives. The Senate, scheduled to begin two weeks of debate on the issue today, appears likely to pass a less draconian bill, perhaps more along the lines of what President Bush has in mind. The president’s plan while it, too, would erect a fence along the border and treat anyone who sneaked across it as a felon would allow many foreigners to stay in the country legally if they have jobs, and put them on a path to citizenship if they so desire.
There’s a lot of disagreement, of course, over the president’s motivation which his critics characterize as selling out to businesses that want to continue to exploit immigrant workers. But at least it gives these workers hope, and sends a clear message that the United States is looking for reasonable, responsible and humanitarian ways to deal with the enormously complicated immigration issue. And that, we trust, is still the majority view in this country. Simplistic, demagogic solutions and angry, intolerant rhetoric are no more useful to meeting today’s immigration challenges than the excesses of McCarthyism were to fighting the Cold War.