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What to Make of the Candidates' Silence on Immigration
October 15, 2008
Immediately preceeding the second presidential candidate debate, CNN's Lou Dobbs challenged his audience to notice the care that senators McCain and Obama would take to avoid tackling the issue of immigration. He was obviously furious about their omission. According to Mr. Dobbs, here was the "number one problem in America" and the two people who aspire to fix his country's woes aren't even alluding to it. The implication, according to CNN's shock jock, is that this willful neglect must represent part of an elite bipartisan conspiracy against the American middle class.
As it happens, there is a perfectly logical, political, explanation for the Great Non-debate about immigration in the presidential election. To begin with, both candidates are genuinely friendly to immigration by conviction (Mr. McCain's tack to the right regarding the border fence notwithstanding). More significantly, Americans are of two minds on the topic.
A special report published by The Economist identifies several issues. First, "immigration is... an apparently marginal issue that can swiftly overwhelm a campaign." To wit, "candidates are often punished for saying exactly what voters say they want them to say". This strange state of affairs was seen when several rabid Republican anti-immigrationists recently lost Congressional elections. Then, the most hard-line presidential candidate, Tom Tancredo, performed the worst. According to the report, Americans distinguish between the "principle" of immigration, which they are for, and the "practice" of illegal immigration, which they are against. A candidate who cannot navigate these treacherous waters, gets trounced.
So, in the case of senators McCain and Obama, it behooves neither to bring up the topic. Mr. Obama has gone so far as to be for granting driver's licenses to illegal immigrants, something most people oppose. But, if Senator McCain were to attack him on immigration, he could be branded a "flip-flopping" opportunist who once received full marks from the ultra-liberal National Council of La Raza. Their careful avoidance of the topic is thus not part of a conspiracy, but rather a case of political expediency based on shared principles.
Immigration was the perfect issue for many angry people who are now frustrated. First, there is that percentage of society that seeks to blame the "other" for their troubles. Undocumented migration was the ideal issue for many of them, especially after overt racism became socially repugnant after the Civil Rights era. The new wave of immigrants made great "others". They were mestizo Mexicans (brown, not white), they were poor, and they spoke a different language. They are in the country illegally, giving rise to the perfectly "accurate", but certainly dehumanizing, term "illegal immigrant". Thanks to illegal immigration, you could hate a whopping 12 million people inside your own country, regardless of their character or merit, without being ostracized. You weren't racist, you were just law-abiding volk - I mean, folk.
That is the fringe, which acts as the tinder to light a bigger social fire. Most people who decry illegal immigration are not "bigots" (which implies intolerance towards the views of others), or "racists" (which refers to discrimination based on race). Out of the approximately 50% of Americans who worry about illegal immigration a large majority are genuinely concerned about so many people sidestepping the law and disrupting their community with their numbers. But they are not angry enough to see too politicians gain power by being mean to their gardeners.
The economic crisis is set to change the status quo, but it is very difficult to know exactly how. To begin with, it is pushing the immigration issue, which is a long-term problem, onto the back burner, as people worry more about how to avert disaster today. More significantly, all of the latest figures, from Border Patrol detentions to remittances, show imporant declines. Usually, the first to arrive are the first to leave, so this reduction could reduce animosity towards immigrants in general, as the least assimilated vacate the parking lots of the local Home Depot.
For Mexico, this reversal will create problems. According to the country's National Agrarian Confederation (CNC, by its acronym in Spanish), Mexico could see the return of 350,000 migrants. That's 350,000 people who are going to need jobs back home, when Mexico's expulsion of workers to the US had been seen as a "safety valve" which kept the country's unemployment rate under control. Immigration is caused by relative differences in wealth, so if life in Mexico becomes harsher, even a recessionary USA will look relatively better... and the cycle begins again.
None of this seems to be grist for the 2008 presidential debate mill. But, for the moment, Mr. Dobbs can find comfort in the fact that the economy is "dealing" with the issue even when the candidates try to ignore it.
For the latest thought-provoking article by Agustin Barrios Gomez please go to our Opinion Column page
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