Walking the Border

This border security plan that Bush laid out tonight is stomach-turningly cynical. It's a blatant ploy to pander to two constituencies within the Republican Party which ordinarily agree but are facing each other down over this.

If you're a big-money, heavily-contributing Republican businessman, illegal immigrants are http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OcZiel6D18. You don't have to provide them benefits. You don't have to pay them minimum wage. In fact, you barely have to do anything except give them the opportunity to work and conceal their undocumented status, and you have an excellent source of cheap labor that is not going to be unionizing any time soon.

On the other hand, if you're a social conservative, then illegal immigrants are a hot-button issue. Illegal immigrants represent massive, widespread flouting of immigration law, allowing literally millions of people make a mockery of our national sovereignty. And they also represent a nearly-criminal security failure where anyone who can smuggle a family of illegals or a bale of marijuana into the country can also smuggle, say, an al-Qaeda cell or a nuclear weapon.

I happen to be on the conservative side here, which is an uncommon, if not unheard of, occurrence. Not because I have anything against illegal immigrants- they work a hell of a lot harder than some Americans and are willing to risk death to do it- but because the situations which allows them entry into the country is, as I mentioned, incredibly detrimental to our border and homeland security efforts. Now obviously, I'm fine with a guest worker program. I think it's a good idea, although I dislike the fact that up to 50% of their earnings will probably be sent out of our economy as remittances. Also, I don't oppose the idea of allowing "earned citizenship" if people have been here for a long time and want to become legitimate. But I'd rather expend the scant federal dollars locking down the borders than funding additional bureaucracy.

The Minutemen, those crazy loons who sit out on the Arizona border (and, hilariously enough, the Vermont border, too, if you watch The Daily Show) gave Bush a May 25th deadline to either secure the border or they'd start building their own freakin' wall, on private land, of course. So to avoid an embarrassing confrontation with them, and with his conservative allies, Bush is trying to split the difference- placating business while placating hard-core conservatives who want the Mexicans out and the border closed.

Here's the problem. You can't logically close the border, while still allowing a guest worker program and a path to "earned citizenship." Why not, you ask? Because it does not make any sense whatsoever to tell people, "Yeah, if you made it here already, you're cool, but dammit, don't try to cross the Rio Grande tomorrow, because now we're serious about border security!"

Earned citizenship is going to be an incentive for people to run across the border and avoid enrolling in the guest worker program, because that program would end up just shipping them back to their home country in a few years. Why do that, when you can claim you've been here longer than you have (who's got the records to prove otherwise?) and "earn" your citizenship?

Basically, I would have been happy (okay, maybe not, probably still a little grumpy) if Bush had decided to pick border security or a soft-border guest worker and earned-citizenship program. But now he's sending the same message to two different constituencies- I want to keep everybody happy by not doing enough on either end.