The Post gets ugly on immigration By Donald Collins
Sunday, December 16, 2007 http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/s_542950.html Off again goes The Washington Post, breaking into an ugly ad hominem attack mode on the immigration issue in its Dec. 13th lead editorial, "The Immigration Swamp: As the presidential campaign intensifies, so does the nativist ferocity." In short, The Post opines, let's not have a discussion that makes sense for American citizens. Let's just keep blustering away by calling U.S. citizens "nativists," a word that has morphed into slightly less of a pejorative than "racists." This Post editorial represents the voices of those powerful forces who want to keep our borders open, keep the Mexican trucks rolling freely into the U.S. and prevent a border fence from being built. Those powerful open-border forces have gotten truly angry and quite desperate, as The Post editorial proves, since the June 28 failure of Congress to enact a comprehensive immigration reform bill. That ugly bill, which few congressmen read, was in fact a massive call for another amnesty law like the 1986 one that proved to be a complete bust, as evidenced by the arrival of millions more illegal aliens since -- probably most of the 12 million to 20 million now estimated to be living in the U.S. The Post has the chutzpah to claim that that absurd congressional reform bill "would have tightened security at the borders; cracked down on employers who knowingly hire undocumented workers; established a legal mechanism for immigration for the hundreds of thousands of workers who enter the country each year to fill low-skill jobs; and provided a path to legal status for the illegal immigrants now living in America." Those claims, except for the path to legal status, are simply not true. That legislation had no teeth to do what was claimed by its supporters. The Post editorial board also is truly upset that such Republican presidential candidates as Romney, Huckabee, Thompson, Giuliani and Tancredo (no Johnny-come-lately to real reform) have begun to realize that voters want real reform. The Post attacks Huckabee for his plan while chiding him for being inconsistent in the past: "Mr. Huckabee was promptly rewarded for his reversal with an endorsement from Jim Gilchrist, founder of the Minuteman Project, a group of xenophobes who spend their time videotaping and harassing day laborers wherever they find them." You mean "illegal border crossers"? That's OK with you? The Post carries its anti-law-enforcement rhetoric to the extreme when it comments, "It's a fair guess that this cruel campaign of immigrant-bashing will eventually turn toxic for the Republican Party itself, whose own strategists (Karl Rove among others) have long grasped the growing electoral clout of Hispanics." The language of The Post's editorial is so purple at time it gets ludicrous. Try this paragraph: "America has had its paroxysms of anti-immigrant fervor in the past, also accompanied by spasms of violence and persecution. Today, as in the past, the national atmosphere is subverting the discussion, drowning out reason. Look at the uproar that overwhelmed New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer's sensible, safety-minded proposal to make illegal immigrants eligible for driver's licenses, and you will see logic defeated by posturing, political cowardice and the poisonous diatribes of talk radio." Folks, this is angry, desperate bashing of a reasoned approach to immigration reform that is not worthy of any editorial board, much less The Post's. But, sadly, ad hominem attacks have become the last resort of the major media, the big corporations, the cheap-labor crowd and the ideological and ethnic lobbyists ever since they found they couldn't steamroller those citizens who became aware, angry and aroused by the dangerous conditions created by the very people who now use the word "nativist" to describe those who propose real reform. Real reform is nonpartisan. Getting it right won't be easy, but it is the right thing to do. Breaking down further our rule of law is not a path to progress. Let's show more courage and less negative profiling of those who would fix the immigrant invasion. The Washington Post can rant and rave. And though it may be that other factors will elect an open-border-minded Democrat president, I suspect many others will be elected next fall who will offer us little people, us U.S. citizens, a "Square Deal" on immigration instead of a "Raw Deal." 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