Oops! This sorta posted when I wasn’t looking. Basically, it’s some stuff I cut out of the column trying to make it fit in the paper, followed by my full rough draft — before I started editing, filling in gaps, etc.
People take it very seriously, as does he:
“I’ve got a son who’s almost 17,” Rep. Barrett said. “If he’s like his Dad, he’ll go to the Citadel. It he’s like his Dad, he’ll then go into the Army. If he goes into the Army, odds are he’ll be going somewhere where somebody’s going to be shooting at him.”
As for what he’s hearing from constituents about the war: “I don’t feel a lack of support, but I do hear a lot of concern.”
A cloud, in other words.
Back in the spring of 2005, my brother up in Greenville received a slick flier from a guy who was seeking the GOP nod to replace former House Speaker David Wilkins. One side of the mailing mentioned nothing about South Carolina, but reproduced a USAToday story about border patrol failures in Arizona. The other side quoted a report to the effect that “36,000 illegal aliens resided in South Carolina as of 2000,” and went on to say, “Friends, as startling as that may be, those figures are 5 years old!”
Anyway, Warren Mowry promised to do something about it. I had to double-check: Yes, he was running for office on the state, not the federal, level. And he apparently wasn’t kidding.
People who see this as black-and-white hate the word “undocumented,” seeing it as a weaselly euphemism for “illegal.” But here’s the thing: Those illegals are undocumented, which means we have no records on them. We don’t know who they are or where they are.
WHOLE LONG VERSION:
With Congress on break, U.S. Rep. Gresham Barrett has been meeting with his 3rd District constituents. When he came by to visit us at The State Wednesday, we asked him what was on the minds of all those good folk.
“Immigration” came in first.
Second, he said, was “immigration.”
Third was immigration.
It was also fourth.
And he supposed that “the war” maybe came in fifth.
I’m sure our troops over there will appreciate making the Top Ten.
He admitted that he was being “a little facetious.” The war is “a cloud” casting its shadow over everything political. People take it very seriously, as does he:
“I’ve got a son who’s almost 17,” Rep. Barrett said. “If he’s like his Dad, he’ll go to the Citadel. It he’s like his Dad, he’ll then go into the Army. If he goes into the Army, odds are he’ll be going somewhere where somebody’s going to be shooting at him.”
As for what he’s hearing from constituents about the war: “I don’t feel a lack of support, but I do hear a lot of concern.”
A cloud, in other words. But there are no clouds on the stark immigration landscape. The sun is shining down on that one like the proverbial interrogation lamp, casting the kinds of shadows that make for night-and-day contrast. Night as in, if you give the wrong answer, there are a lot of GOP voters out there ready to cast you into the everlasting darkness.
For those of you who have missed the past year, “the immigration issue” does not refer to how many Chinese nationals we’ll allow to study at U.S. universities, or how closely we should study Pakistani passports at air terminals.
We’re talking Mexicans.
“It’s no fun being an illegal alien” sang Phil Collins and company in one of the more inane pop releases of the 1980s. And nowadays, it’s no fun being a Republican with the “wrong” answer regarding people who were once referred to by the moisture they were presumed to have collected on their shirts while wading the Rio Grande on moonless nights.
“Wrong,” of course, can vary, depending on whether you’re a lobbyist for the big business types who have been the GOP’s bread and butter for generations, or one of the salt-of-the-earth folk who crowded into the Big Tent in recent decades and created the vaunted GOP majority.
I suspect that a lot of the illegals who build our houses, pick our crops and process our chicken would prefer the return of that epithet to the kind of attention the have garnered in recent months.
The main question I had on the subject for congressman Barrett was one that no one has yet answered to my satisfaction:
How did this issue become such a Big Deal all of a sudden? What changed? We’ve had Mexican tiendas in our neighborhoods, even in South Carolina, for much of the past decade. For even longer, it’s been hard to communicate on a construction site without a working knowledge of Spanish. Bill Clinton could hardly put together a Cabinet in 1993 for all the illegals working as nannies and such for his nominees.
Yes, over the last 10 or 20 years, there’s been a huge influx, perhaps picking up a bit around the turn of the century. But what changed in the past 12 or 15 months. As near as I can tell, looking at the real world out there, nothing. The same trends continued, with no noticeably acceleration.
But in the unreal world of politics, it’s as though, sometime during the summer of 2005 or so, a huge portion of the electorate suddenly woke up from a Rip Van Winkle catnap and said, “Whoa! Where did all these Hispanics come from?”
There were always people out there who considered illegal immigration Issue One on the national landscape. On the left, you had union types concerned about cheap labor depressing wages and working conditions. On the right, you had culture warriors furious at hearing anything other than English spoken within our borders. On both sides, drifting amid the high-sounding words about fairness and the rule of law, there was a disturbing whiff of 19th century Know-Nothingism in the air.
I had one or two people who e-mailed me about it regularly, always furious at us for taking the “wrong” position on the issue — even though, until it moved to the front burner back in the spring, we didn’t have a position on it. (We favor the Senate approach.)
Back in the spring of 2005, my brother up in Greenville received a slick flier from a guy who was seeking the GOP nod to replace former House Speaker David Wilkins. One side of the mailing mentioned nothing about South Carolina, but reproduced a USAToday story about border patrol failures in Arizona. The other side quoted a report to the effect that “36,000 illegal aliens resided in South Carolina as of 2000,” and went on to say, “Friends, as startling as that may be, those figures are 5 years old!”
Anyway, Warren Mowry promised to do something about it. I had to double-check: Yes, he was running for office on the state, not the federal, level. And he apparently wasn’t kidding.
Nor are the letter-writers who today are ready to throw Lindsey Graham out of the Senate for wanting to do something reasonable and realistic about immigration. Today, a flier such as that wouldn’t leave me scratching my head.
I feel a little like Winston Smith in 1984: Everybody’s going around saying, “Immigration is Issue One! Immigration has always been Issue One!” And he feels like the only person in the world who remembers that that wasn’t the case not so long ago. And he struggles to understand how things got turned around.
Unlike Winston, who lived in a world in which records that disputed the official line were destroyed, I have thousands of news databases at my fingertips via Lexis-Nexis. And at the risk of having the Thought Police pick me up, I’m going to tell you what it says.
“Immigration” alone would be too broad a query, and the search engine would throw it out for returning too many results. So I narrowed it by searching for that word plus “Gresham Barrett.”
During the past year, the terms showed up in news media 53 times. In the previous year, only 20 times. In all previous years, 40 times. And I should add that back when he was first running for Congress in 2002, he was talking about about keeping out terrorists, mainly from such places as Iran and Iraq. In fact, opponent Jim Klauber blasted him for paying too much attention to countries “where terrorists come from,” while ignoring “the greatest problem in the 3rd Congressional District” — which, of course, was illegal immigration from Mexico.
When I said “of course,” I was being ironic, but Mr. Klauber wasn’t. Nor is Mr. Barrett when he stands foursquare behind the House’s “enforcement first” approach, or when he runs down to the border to check on the situation before facing his constituents, thereby demonstrating his deep concern about this crucial issue.
Here’s are a few of the things I don’t understand, probably because I don’t watch TV and therefore haven’t had it explained to me by XXX O’Reilly:
Where did all those people come from? I mean the ones who weren’t even talking about this issue a year ago, but now write letter after letter promising to toss Lindsey Graham out of the Senate for taking a rational, nuanced approach that actually recognizes that this issue is really complicated.
How can people really see this issue in black-and-white terms? Hey, I want to see the laws enforced, too. But I know that a nation that can’t find one guy in the mountains of Afghanistan isn’t going to round up 10 to 20 million people walking the streets of the freest, least-controlled nation in the world. People who see this as black-
and-white hate the word “undocumented,” seeing it as a weaselly euphemism for “illegal.” But here’s the thing: Those illegals are undocumented, which means we have no records on them. We don’t know who they are or where they are.
Yes, it’s theoretically possible to round up most of them. The Nazi police state of 1942 Germany probably could have achieved a success rate of 80 or 90 percent. And it’s probably possible to build a 2,000-mile fence that would be more-or-less impassable.
But at what cost? I’m not even talking moral or spiritual cost, in the sense of “what kind of nation would that make us?” I’ll let somebody else preach that sermon. I’m talking hard cash.
Take a look at the national debt. Take a look at our inadequate presence in Iraq and Afghanistan. Check out the rising power of nations such as Iran, Russia and Venezuela, whom we are making impervious to international pressure with our insatiable thirst for petrol. Note the fact that we don’t have enough military assets to make Iran take us seriously when we suggest they should stop working on nukes for terrorists, or else. Or else what?
Let’s talk priorities, folks, not fantasies. The “invasion” that endangers this country isn’t a bunch of people looking to (gasp) sweep our Wal-Marts to feed their families back in XXXXX. It’s Londoners getting on a flight at Heathrow with a bogus tube of Prell in their carry-ons.
Illegal immigration is a serious problem, when it gets to where you have 12 million aliens you can’t account for. Our borders need to be secure. Having our labor market, wages and working conditions distorted by a huge supply of cheap, illegal labor is also a serious problem. It’s just as big a problem that our neighbors to the south suffer such crushing poverty that they will risk their lives crossing the border in order to have their labor exploited.
But not one of these things is the most urgent problem facing this country. Nor is any of them in second, third or fourth place, although they may be in the top ten. That was the case a year ago, and it’s still the case now.
