Saturday's protest completely bulldozed the contours of the immigration battleground for the U.S., creating deeper trenches, tougher hills to be taken and - most likely - a greater risk of ugly "patriotic" bloodshed.
When 500,000 people - many of them illegal immigrants, if reports of the event are accurate - can take over the streets of a major American metropolis to protest changes in the law, then two things have become obvious:
1) Vast numbers of immigrants in L.A. feel entitled to work in this country and demand the rights of citizens - whether they're here legally or not.
2) They may be a major contributing engine to our economy, culture and society, and simultaneously a major drain on our public services. But now it's clear they're also too large a force to be merely kept out with a simple array of fences, guards and felony threats - or to be flatly ignored ...
They have attained some considerable - if not legitimized at a government level by anyone beyond Mayor Villaraigosa and a few other officials, who joined the march - political muscle.
In short, they're here, they like being here, and they're not going away until they can be assured we'll let them come back. All of these conditions were in place before Sunday's march. But the march sharpened the argument considerably and whetted appetites on both sides of it for a solid solution.
We can probably count on an increase in anti-immigrant bias, hatred and, doubtless, violence; a jump in political swordplay; and - most disastrously - the husbandry of myriad strict and unenforceable new laws.
The Sensenbrenner Bill is a case in point - is there money in the budget for the extra police enforcement, jail capacity and judicial staffing required to handle thousands of felony busts of the sort that apparently would ensue any time a Home Depot shopper in L.A. brings a trabajador home and pays him $12 to help rearrange the shrubbery?
Probably not.
Call it a pigheaded hunch, but I don't think stronger enforcement is the key.
If we want foreigners to quit violating the borders, breaking the law, ducking the taxman and using the support of our social services at our expense to keep body and soul together long enough to earn a small living in our country, then we're going to have to get real on several levels:
Widen citizenship channels so that people from other countries can become Americans more easily and start paying their share of the tax burden they're creating.
Pump seed money or political incentive (embargoes? tariffs?) into the foreign countries doing the bulk of the illegal immigration to push them to grow their own economies strong enough to keep their countrymen - and their labor output - home.
Quit focusing so monomaniacally on the border with Mexico and points south, and look at illegal immigration from every country with equal caution and vigilance.
Only after we've done these things can we talk realistically about tightening the border and green card enforcement so as to funnel more would-be immigrants into legal citizenship channels and keep the non-paying residents out.
With the sources and incentives for illegal immigration flowing unchecked, the flood water itself is going to be way too deep and powerful to be stopped by a simple-minded legislative dam.
Some will say we shouldn't allow illegal immigrants to influence our governmental decisions: But aren't we doing that already?
Posted by: Mack_Reed on Sunday, March 26, 2006 - 11:21 PM
