Jeb Bush is correct when he says that an illegal sneaking across the border is an “act of love”. For the majority of illegals this is true; they work, send money home, and for most, with the dream of someday returning home permanently. Jeb Bush is right when he says we need a guest worker program so they can come and go at least once a year.
But what Jeb Bush says is fatally wrong in two regards. First, we now have 14% of the American work force who both want and need jobs, many of the same jobs those workers from below the border are also lining up to fill. The timing for an immigration bill, then, is all wrong.
Jeb Bush’s second fatal flaw is that his last name is all wrong, as well. If it were Jeb Muckingfuss he could do much better. Bad joss, I guess, as he was always believed to be the pick of Ma Bush’s litter. I’ve defended George W Bush on all the lies the Left has accused him of committing, but if he ever told a knowing lie it was about “building the fence first” then sending DHS Director Michael Chertoff out to say that the fence they were building was actually only a “virtual” one; i.e., a bunch of cameras. It was then people knew a fix was in. It was then they started distrusting Bush, for once the people realized that fix was in, they also believed a lie was embedded in there someplace and GW Bush knew about it.
So while the morality and practicality of a guest-worker program may arguably be right, the economics and politics clearly are not. At least not now. Everyone knows how the Democrats feel about that fence.; no, no, and hell no. People also know how Dems feel about allowing illegals to get an easy path to citizenship, or in any other way, being able to vote, even if the vast majority don’t want to become citizens but return home, as I just said. So they sure would like to get a House bill over into committee.
This natural skepticism and unease about the true intentions of the Democrats, to get voters, not workers, is only exacerbated by the feckless full-speed ahead by the GOP House leadership, yes, Boehner Cantor and Ryan, to get a bill passed, any bill…while saying nothing about 1) the original close-the-border pledge, and 2) a longer path to citizenship as a kind of penalty for being here illegally in the first place. I often lay awake at night worried that maybe Karl Rove is advising the GOP on these matters. Fully 80% of the illegals in America don’t want citizenship, but rather a work-card, so that once they’ve sent enough money back home to dig the first well and indoor plumbing to the first house in their neighborhood, they can return to live there as men of property, entrepreneurs because they took risks, to be somebody, instead of going through two generations of being “just Mexicans” in central Ohio. If the Republicans were true to their word, they would help facilitate this, but only after a sizeable number of our own unemployed men and women are back on the job.
I wrote in January about the GOP’s “sell-out” position on this issue, for in the end, it’s the Democrats who are unwilling to give the illegals what they really want. Dems want new voters and payoffs to Latino NGO’s who will return the favor in spades once they can get their arms around those newly legalized illegals. They could care less about happy Latino workers. And to get a deal, any deal, the GOP will give the Dems what they want, ignoring the far brighter political prospects of playing the original Secure-the-Borders and Guest Worker cards, slapping them right on the Democrats’ nose, making a big, and very successful, campaign issue about it, not to mention even doing the right thing every once in a blue moon.
If you’re the least bit curious, as you find this position by the current GOP leadership not only wrong but stupid, the short answer is that the bigger fight in which the GOP finds itself engaged today is the one where it finds itself locked arm-in-arm with the Democrats as comrades…against us. To to the current GOP leadership this immigration fight represents a turf war of the most elemental variety; Them vs Us. And we, the people, not the Democrats, are Them.
