The president took to the airwaves last night, but not to talk about terrorism or the war in Iraq. This time — a first for his presidency — he made a domestic issue, immigration, the subject hoping to stop a revolt on his right flank without angering the business/corporate element of his party’s support base.
So we get some basic proposals: A guest worker program, a path for some who are here already to gain legal status, an increase in the number of border agents with the National Guard being temporarily deployed until the agents can be brought on board.
The New York Times rightly called the speech “a victory for the fear-stricken fringe of the debate. “
“Rather than standing up for truth,” it wrote, “Mr. Bush swiveled last night in the direction of those who see immigration, with delusional clarity, as entirely a problem of barricades and bad guys.”
Ultimately, Amy M. Traub, associate director of research for the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy, says the speech “was more about politics than policy.” Writing on Tom Paine, she said the president managed to spend 20 minutes on immigration policy without offering “a genuinely workable solution to the nation’s immigration problems.” Instead,
“President Bush sought to pacify a wide range of restive political constituencies — from the conservative base feeling threatened both economically and culturally by increased immigration, to the big businesses eager to maintain and expand access to a supply of cheap and exploitable labor, to a Latino electorate wary of a Republican party that looks increasingly willing to sell them out. As a result, the president’s grab-bag of policy half-measures is likely to end up satisfying no one.”
The problem, as she sees it, is that militarizing and further criminalizing the situation will do little more than exacerbate the problems that already exist. And the guest worker programs is only likely to institutionalize the downward pressures on wages created by the current influx of lower-wage workers.
Her answer is trecognizeniz(e) the role unauthorized immigrants play in our economy while at the same time guaranteeing that they are afforded rights in the workplace to ensure that their wages and working conditions don’t undermine the rights and wages of all workers.”
I would like to add — as I wrote in my Cranbury Press Dispatches column two weeks ago — that the issue is not the immigrants themselves, but the current rules governing the global business community, rules that encourage businesses to cut costs — either by slashing wages or ignoring environmental problems — without any regard to their impact on the rest of the world.
Channel Surfing, The South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
Hank Kalet 