Muzzled (18 page)

I hope that, by the time this book is published, President Obama has risen to the challenge put forward by Zakaria.
His response to Ryan’s budget plan shows that he very well may. Many Americans other than Zakaria are counting on this president to lead great national conversations, and indeed many elected him precisely because he seemed the person most likely to do so.

W
ELL AFTER GEORGE W. BUSH LEFT OFFICE, once he’d escaped the punishing grip of right-wing bullies enforcing their brand of politically correct ideas and speech codes on him, here is what the conservative Republican president dared to say about the repeated breakdown of government eff orts to resolve the national crisis over immigration.

“I not only differ from my own party but the other party as well,” the former president said in a C-SPAN TV interview. “The reason immigration reform died was because of a populism that had emerged.” The news here is that the former president was willing to point to his own party’s culpability for wasting time with political posturing that stalled much-needed national action on a serious issue.

The former president strained to walk a fine line, pointing a finger at Democrats as well as Republicans for not reaching agreement on immigration. But the “populism” he blamed was almost completely to be found on right-wing talk radio and among the most conservative voices in Congress. When the
former president let it be known that even as the most powerful man in Washington he had been unable to act in America’s best interest because of “a populism that had emerged,” anyone paying attention drew an inescapable conclusion. In his heart Bush blamed bitter, frenzied talk by extremists in his own party. Extremists impose a cancerous form of political correctness that demands conformity and kills any possibility of a reasoned approach to immigration reform and other issues.

“The failure of immigration reform points out larger concerns about the direction of our politics,” President Bush wrote in his memoir. “The blend of isolationism, protectionism, and nativism that affected the immigration debate also led Congress to block free trade agreements with Colombia, Panama, and South Korea. I recognize the genuine anxiety that people feel about foreign competition. But our economy, our security, and our culture would all be weakened by an attempt to wall ourselves off from the world.”

“What is interesting about our country, if you study history, is that there are some ‘isms’ that occasionally pop up,” President Bush explained in the TV interview on C-SPAN. “One is isolationism and its evil twin, protectionism, and its evil triplet, nativism. So if you study the twenties, for example, there was an America-first policy that said, ‘Who cares what happens in Europe?’ … My point is that we’ve been through this kind of period of isolationism, protectionism, and nativism. I’m a little concerned that we may be going through the same period. I hope these ‘isms’ pass.”

The former president’s remarks set off the right-wing talk-show hosts. One conservative pundit, Laura Ingraham, said
that “to say that it’s all about hostility to foreigners is ludicrous.… Maybe President Bush was right. We are suffering from an outbreak of isms. Elitism comes to mind.”

It was just the kind of attack Bush had experienced when he tried to grapple with the issue of immigration as president. Those on the extreme Right labeled him a moderate and said he had lost touch and abandoned the Republican Party for attempting to pass immigration reform in 2007.

That year the president supported an immigration reform bill supported by Republican senator John McCain and Democratic senator Ted Kennedy, among others. But the right wing tore into the bill as “amnesty for illegal immigrants.” Conservative writer Ann Coulter claimed it would turn America into a “roach motel.” And the king of conservative talk radio, Rush Limbaugh, said the bill was the first step on the road to doom for the Republican Party because it invited a flood of likely Democrats into the country. He said it also spelled doom for schools, hospitals, and welfare lines burdened by this mass of newcomers. Any Republican senator who dared to voice support for President Bush and the bill came under fire as a RINO (Republican in name only), a traitor to conservative principles. Senator Lindsey Graham was labeled “Graham-nesty” for his support of the bill. The harsh rhetoric poisoned any chance for reasoned, honest debate, and the bill died. Even as late as 2010 the power of the extremist poison was still being felt. Senator McCain, fighting for his political life in a primary challenge from a strong anti–immigration reform opponent, had to renounce his support for his own bill and take a hard-line position against immigration reform.

The pattern of paralyzing attacks from politicians and the
media that killed the Bush immigration-reform plan fits a pattern that is now standard theater in Washington, courtesy of both sides of the aisle and their supporters.

In the opening act the nation faces a difficult issue. A glimmer of hope appears when a group of Republican and Democratic leaders begin talks and work on a serious, practical resolution. And then the curtain comes down on act 1. In the second act, those statesmen are attacked as elitists for ignoring the will of the people as expressed in popular partisan positions. They are derided as weak-kneed people ignoring supporters on the Left and Right. In the third and final act, the political leaders stop talking to one another across party lines and eventually stop looking for answers as they become preoccupied with countering threats from party members and political supporters to cut off campaign funds. That is immediately followed by announcements that fiery political opponents will challenge those “out-of-touch” members of Congress in upcoming primaries.

That modern political drama in the Capitol also includes a subplot featuring a cast of second-string politicians who make no effort at serious debate in search of answers but gain several minutes of fame for denouncing anyone suggesting new, pragmatic thinking about the issue. They are rewarded with cameo appearances in which they make outlandish statements. In the immigration fight Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican, got a ton of media attention and praise from talk radio in 2006 when she appealed to fears of an immigrant invasion by declaring, “Every town has become a border town. Every state has become a border state.” Congressman Phil Gingrey, a Georgia Republican, won major
press coverage in 2010 when he denounced what he described as “anchor babies.” He said illegal immigrants regularly plotted to have their children born in the United States to gain citizenship rights granted under the Constitution to anyone born on American soil. That same year, Congressman Louie Gohmert, a Texas Republican, won headlines when he took concern over the American-born children of illegal immigrants in the United States to a new level, warning of “terror babies” who are brought into the country by terrorist mothers and raised to carry out terror attacks in the future. And Colorado Republican Tom Tancredo got more than a cameo when he criticized the pope and the Catholic Church for being less interested in offering a Christian, charitable response to illegal immigrants than in “recruiting new members.” The congressman gained further attention when he tied lax immigration enforcement to President Obama. Speaking at a Tea Party convention, Representative Tancredo said, “People who cannot spell the word ‘vote’ or say it in English put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House—his name is Barack Hussein Obama!”

These congressmen and other politicians have every political and financial incentive to stake out extreme positions. When they make offensive comments about illegal immigrants, for example, they become the subjects of heated debates. Videos of their remarks become YouTube sensations. They get invitations to appear on national television. Speech requests pour in from like-minded groups. They suddenly attract campaign contributions nationally. But while there are plenty of incentives to stake out extreme positions on issues, there is little incentive for them to roll up their sleeves and
work out a compromise on issues of critical importance to the future of the nation.

Looking back, the 2007 immigration-reform bill, for example, does not seem so wild and radical an idea as to generate talk of “terror babies” and attacks on the integrity of the pope and worsen an already bitter national controversy. The bill proposed a pathway to citizenship for the twelve million illegal immigrants in the United States. They would have been allowed to enroll in a special “Z visa” program, a point-based merit system that would have taken into account their education, as well as job-related skills, family connections, and proficiency in English. Far from granting “amnesty” to people who entered the country illegally, the law would have required immigrants without proper documents to register their presence in the United States, pay a fine, pay back taxes, and leave the country before applying for legal immigrant status.

The bill also provided more money for border security. Lack of funding for surveillance and armed patrols is a sticking point for many when it comes to immigration reform. Over the last few years Mexico has been ravaged by corruption, kidnapping, human trafficking, and murder associated with the drug trade. There is rational fear, especially among people living in U.S. towns bordering Mexico, of violence and anarchy following the drug trade into the United States. Had the bill backed by President Bush become law, there would be more surveillance technology and more agents patrolling the borders. Anyone who said the bill did not increase border security was misrepresenting the truth. But the lie was repeated again and again until it appeared that the bill’s commitment to border security was up for debate, a matter of partisan dispute.

One congressman, Republican Steve King of Iowa, an opponent of the 2007 bill, said the only satisfactory border security is a massive wall across the thousands of miles of the U.S. border. Representative King actually brought a scale model of such a wall to the House floor, and he had a simulated electrified wire on top of his wall. He was outraged when critics said his wall looked like a prison and posed a danger of electric shock to people coming near the wall. The congressman said the electric wire would not kill people but act as a “discouragement” to trespassing. “We do this with livestock all the time.”

King’s impractical proposal for a wall from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific is one more example of how rational debate is derailed by the sensational time and again. This is what President Bush referred to as isolationism run wild. Even if the wall were built, it would not be effective in stopping illegal immigrants from crossing the border. In his 2010 memoir President Bush wrote, “The longest and tallest fence in the world would not stop those determined to provide for their families.” Janet Napolitano, former governor of a border state, Arizona, and now secretary of Homeland Security, said it best when she said that fifty-foot-tall walls result in fifty-one-foot ladders. A similarly impractical proposal from opponents of immigration reform is that all illegal immigrants be deported. Senator McCain’s response to that suggestion (at least in the past)? To point out that the United States doesn’t have twelve million pairs of handcuffs.

But the Democrats are hardly idle in the audience during such Republican political dramas. They actively encourage these displays by issuing expressions of outrage that delight
the Far Right and prompt more offensive statements about immigrants. In the case of the 2007 immigration debate, the Democrats claimed that the guest-worker plan created levels of immigrants that amounted to a medieval caste system by stigmatizing low-wage temporary workers. It was a weak argument when compared to the potential passage of a bill that opened a legal door for people to get jobs without worry of being exploited by employers or chased by immigration agents. But the Democrats’ posturing allowed them to claim the mantle of being defenders of the immigrant community. Democrats saw political opportunity in the Republican excess. The Hispanic community increasingly identified with Democrats as the pro-immigrant party and voted for them. The rising Hispanic vote is a potential political gold mine for Democrats. The result? Neither Republicans nor Democrats have a strong reason to alter their positions in search of a compromise that might lead the nation to come to terms with a dysfunctional immigration policy, as we shall see.

Many Hispanics, too, have used the national focus on the immigration drama for their own purposes. They dismiss calls that Hispanics deal with legitimate concerns over rising numbers of Mexican and Latin American legal and illegal aliens who make little or no effort to assimilate into life in the United States, even as they clamber to get into the country and enjoy the benefits of living here. The push for assimilation is now often dismissed inside the Latino community as a betrayal of an immigrant’s true identity. To this way of thinking, only self-hating immigrants move away from their native roots and the ethnic, nationalistic, and racial parameters of the old country. By that logic it has become politically correct and chic, especially
among younger Latino immigrants, to disparage those Latinos making the effort to assimilate. What is hip among some young immigrants is remaining apart from the American mainstream and taking identity from refusal to fit into the American melting pot.

In 2009, the Census Bureau reported that 97 percent of people coming to the United States from Mexico and the Dominican Republic spoke no English at home; 52 percent of the people born in another country report they don’t feel confident of their ability to speak English, much less write it. It has never been easier to see identity politics at play than it is today in large Latino communities, dissuading newcomers to America from doing the work necessary for assimilation and consciously breaking with the American tradition of “E Pluribus Unum”—or becoming one people out of many. Today well over half of U.S. immigrants are people of color born in Latin America. In California alone more than a quarter of the population is made up of immigrants. They have to deal with the twin barriers of race and language. And yet inside the Latino community, that very effort is often denigrated. This problem is compounded among illegal immigrants, whose status creates feelings of alienation. Nevertheless, it is critically important for such cultures to assimilate today because there is so much immigration. Self-segregation—remaining isolated and apart from the mainstream in America—is a self-defeating strategy for anyone who wants to be successful in America.