Immigration

The politics of the immigration issue are a litttle different, and more interesting, than most. When it began to loom up a few months ago I thought, okay, apparently something's going on here, I guess I better get with it. So I started paying more attention. Two intriguing things struck me: the size of the protesting groups and the lack of press coverage. One morning on Democracy Now, Amy Goodman said that some hundreds of thousands were protesting in Chicago and that nobody seemed to know anything about it. I checked the news and found nothing. I also called my son who lives in Chicago, and he said, yeah, he left work to go home and here were all these people and he hadn't heard a thing about it. And then some 50,000 protested in Denver, and again there was virtually no coverage. Turns out, as we now know, that the protests were a response mostly to the bill in the House of Representatives that would, among other things, make all illegal immigrants felons and make them all go back to Mexico, and spell out an onerous passage to citizenship. And apparently the protesters were both Mexican immigrants and American sympathizers.
It took me awhile to figure out what I thought about it. Yeah, maybe mandatory ID cards for all citizens would be a good idea. And yeah, those hiring illegals should be prosecuted. But as I followed all the proposals, in Congress and out, it finally dawned on me that everything proposed, except maybe the ID cards, would be worse than leaving things alone. Yes, there are some 11 million who have entered this country illegally. This is a very big deal, especially to those who have borne children here (who by law are American citizens) and would thus either be separated from their kids or would have to take the kids back to Mexico with them.
At this point it also occurred to me that this is far from the major issue in this country (think homelessness, think 17 percent of children in Colorado living in poverty; think the Iraq war; think Congressional corruption). So I came up with only a couple possibilities: talk seriously to Vicente Fox about improving conditions in Mexico, and do something ourselves about bringing Mexico up to developed-country standards. Give more foreign aid. Come up with a plan to educate all children in Mexico. Maybe Bill Gates would be an interested donor. Sure, this takes time. But all the better to start NOW. Otherwise nothing will improve ever.
Then the other day I saw a poll on TV. It said about 50 or 55 percent of Republicans think immigration is the most important issue facing the country, while only 3 percent of Democrats think it is. I had no idea. I had thought maybe a considerable number of Dems would oppose immigration because it depresses wages and takes jobs from American citizens. Apparently not so. So I'm agreeing more or less with my fellow Democrats.