One of the few TV news programs I can stand to watch is "This Week" with George Shephanopolous. Right now, the roundtable of George Will, Fareed Zakaria, and Katrina vanden Heuvel is discussing immigration legislation.
I remember that in early 2005, Republican bloggers were crowing about how they were going to bury the Democrats over immigration. I think the plan was to link illegal immigration to the terrorism boogeyman. This struck me as a dumb strategy at the time. And now we see the GOP captive to its "Build a wall and deport them all" wing. As George Will points out, that's not going to happen whether anyone wants it or not. Zakaria chimes in with an excellent point that attitudes toward illegal immigration send messages about attitudes towards legal immigration. Zakaria is really an under-used public voice.
I look forward to seeing the GOP rip itself apart over immigration.
Posted by mike at March 26, 2006 11:38 AMI enjoy watching This Week, too; but lately I've tuned into Meet the Press more often. What do you think of the latter?
Unsurprisingly, Krugman weighs in on the immigration issue in today's column and does a good job at presenting the nuances of mitigating immigration problems.
I wonder if Bush understands the meaning of "nuanced" or, more importantly, if his advisers give a damn about being insightful when proposing solutions. A friend of mine recently said there's a reason why we don't hear the words "intellectual right" spoken together -- that it's always the "intellectual left" because those who understand the world's problems in an in-depth manner inherently recognize how much each social, economic, etc. group depends on the others in the overall system. I hesitate to make such a blanket statement that fails to address how an indivdual's personal values (in combination with education) inform their political leanings, but I couldn't help but laugh a little with agreement.
Sadly, the right often seems to frame an issue relative to the individual, and it's this selfish oversimplification with which so many Americans likely identify.
Posted by: Lori on March 27, 2006 02:32 PM