Maybe President Bush genuinely wants to solve the United States’ immigration woes, or maybe he’s grasping for another hot-button (hate) issue to drum up conservative support. Today, he proposed immigration reforms in Yuma, Arizona, which were a far cry more punitive than those he advocated last year. A 3-year work visa would cost an immigrant $3,500—a sum beyond the imaginings of most rural Mexicans looking for grunt work in the United States. To get a green card, workers would have to return to their home countries, apply for reentry, and pay a $10,000 fine. The proposal brought 10,000 Latinos to the streets of Los Angeles.
Just two weeks ago, I blogged about a Los Angeles Times article that suggested that last year’s immigration legislation (sans the fence that, thankfully, has not materialized) has brought illegal border crossings down. The article took the number of illegals caught to be representative of the total number. Bush today made the same point: Fewer caught crossers is good news. But, as Think Progress points out, a year and a half ago, Bush pointed to increased apprehensions as a positive indicator of Border Patrol’s performance. As with drugs, the government can manipulate “apprehension” statistics however it wants. (In my previous blog post, I cited Charles Bowden’s assertion in “Exodus” that “On the line, all numbers are fictions. The exportation of human beings by Mexico now reaches, officially, a half million souls a year. Or double that. Or triple that.”)
If illegal immigration is indeed waning on its own, why are we talking about it now? Wouldn’t the war on terror—which we’re losing—be a better policy to rehash? But here I seem to have answered my own question: Yes, it would. Bush tactic: Distract; dissemble; drum up hate for some other group. If illegal immigration isn’t waning—which seems far more likely—doesn’t that beg the question, again, of why we’re not addressing its causes like the European Union does?
