Dartblog

Peggy Noonan writes on immigration here. The most important sentence in her article is this one:

The American people would never accept evening news pictures of sobbing immigrants being torn from their homes and put on a bus.

That’s right. Conservatives who are pushing for solutions involving deportation (which is to say, solutions that they would not characterize as ‘amnesty’) do not, I am convinced, see those pictures in the offing. But they’re there; we can achieve them if we give in to frenzy.

What’s hidden in this debate is that there are plenty of consensus solutions that would be palatable to more than 55% of Americans. (Come to think of it, President Bush’s original plan of two years ago was just such a plan, and had it been described accurately there would not be so much screaming now.) What’s also hidden is that the far right sees immigration as fundamentally a cultural or social issue. Specifically, they are upset to see immigrants acting not like assimilates but like little hardened fortresses. Rather than joining America, they’re dropping in and raising their home flag. Conservatives are right to be worried about that: No nation in history has tolerated such activity, because if nations are anything they are singular and bordered.

I do not imagine that immigrants really want to invade America, annex little pieces, and force everyone around them to start speaking their foreign tongue. I cannot think they come to America yet hate Americanism. It seems more likely that the separatism we increasingly see is because the slightly more clever immigrants have done the same thing politicians have done for many thousands of years. They’ve seen the power of political mobilization through race, class, language, nationality, and they’ve shown immigrants a common—but made-up—enemy. So we see groups like ACORN and ANSWER and we see marches where Americans carry Mexican flags and demand a right to their ‘identity.’ The traditional American left has joined in this largely because it appears to confirm what the American left has always thought, which is that the American right is composed of hateful people.

This is all very unfortunate, but it does not argue for deportation. And it is probably overshadowed by the majority of immigrants who quietly work and raise traditional American families here. They’re the ones we should be trying to help, even as we search for a way to crack down on the abusers and inciters.