Before the last election, George F. Will opined that if the Republicans couldn’t win the White House after Obama’s mismanagement of the economy, the Party should go out of business. The Republicans seem to be taking Will seriously, since the Grand Bargain on immigration amounts to a voluntary bankruptcy petition, one they might so easily avoid. The only grand bargain to which they should agree is one that effectively cures the problem of legal immigration, which is a much more serious problem than illegal immigration. Ted Kennedy’s 1965 Immigraiton Act transformed a center-right nation into one trending center-left, and the new bargain in the works will only make it worse.
We’ll see repeats of the 2012 election, fought over the class warfare issues the immigrants bring with them from their third world countries of origin, and we’ll see this in Congressional as well as presidential elections. Many of the agricultural workers the proposed legislation would bring in would live in purple states which will thereafter turn blue, giving the Democrats the control of all branches of government for the indefinite future.
How to stop this? Very simple. Republicans in the House need to draw a line in the sand: The illegals can be regularized without giving them a path to citizenship, and the present family preference system for immigraton needs to be scaled back radically. The Party doesn’t have to be anti-immigrant, but it can ask for a better kind of immigrant, one with better education and more likely to confer benefits on Americans.
