Cause and Effect World

Agreeing with Jeff Jacoby, and still freaked out about it

Yesterday morning while reading the paper with my morning coffee, I was shocked to find myself reading Jeff Jacoby’s column and not only nodding in agreement, but exclaiming - Yes! Jeff! You go boy!

See, usually I want to punch the guy. 

But, in his column The demonizing of illegal immigrants, he takes conservative talk show hosts - Pat Buchanan, Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs - to task for only looking at the illegal entry:

“They don’t ask whether it makes sense to bar industrious and productive go-getters who value America as a land of opportunity and who supply labor for which there is a yawning demand. As far as they’re concerned, illegal aliens are “immigration criminals,” and the only issue on the agenda is how to keep them out.” The Boston Globe, June 13, 2007

Jacoby asks whether the act of putting a flyer into someone’s mailbox, while admittedly illegal, is ‘evil.’  He goes on:

“Someone who crosses the border without a visa in order to find work doesn’t deserve to be branded a “criminal.” Doing so only inflames and confuses an issue that is contentious enough as it is. And it cheapens a word that should be reserved for those who purposely harm others through genuinely wrongful behavior: embezzlers, rapists, arsonists, murderers.”

And finally, he says that the demonization of these ‘border crossers’ is preventing us from having a rational discussion of the important issues to solve a complex problem with no easy solutions:

“The national debate should be focused on real issues — how many annual newcomers our economy can absorb, the best way to encourage immigrants to assimilate, what to require of illegals so they can get right with the law, how to protect national security without undermining the open character of American society. Instead we are saddled with hysterical condemnations of “amnesty” and delusional demands for a 2,000-mile barrier along the Mexican border.”

From my point of view, Jacoby doesn’t shy away from demonizing other groups of people who fall outside his ‘in-group*,’ so his position on this makes me wonder if there are illegal immigrants in his in-group - someone employed in his home, a relative, cleaning the Globe office building.  Or, perhaps he is more attuned to the notion of immigration, illegal or not, when circumstances are dire.

In any case, standing up to the shrill, nasty voices within the conservative Republican party is not for sissies, and for this I commend Jacoby. 

* See Who are More Moral?  Liberals or Conservatives? for a discussion of how conservatives view in-group vs. out-group.