vanden Heuvel: We’ve squandered the last many years. I think it will be tougher, in tough economic times, to have a fair debate. What’s always off the radar, what surprises me, is there’s so little attention to going to the root cause. There’s so little attention to how one promotes economic development, for example, in Mexico, or in central parts of Latin America, because that is the root cause from where people come to seek work. They’re not coming here to have fun. They need work. They need jobs. It will be not high on the agenda, I fear, but it will be central to an America that is abiding by rule of law and has a moral core to treat those who come here with a set of principles that allow American workers to be on a level playing field with workers coming from abroad, and I think part of what we need to pass on is that if we don’t level the playing field so that there is a path to citizenship for immigrant workers, the race to the bottom is going to hurt American workers. We’re in this together. We’re in the same boat, so let’s have a floor from which we can all rise from and to find that solidarity between workers, America and those coming from abroad will be part of, I think, a productive immigration policy as well as going to the central economic issues.
Discuss
shawn disney on February 8, 2009, 5:32 PM
When she promotes “levelling the playing field”, she overlooks that we have already done that: the “floor” is the wage level of the country the immigrants came from,as well as the culture they left, in many cases ,a police state.
shawn disney on February 28, 2009, 11:08 PM
A great idea to consider, that. About the level playing field: thanks to immigration, its being levelled , all right: down. In case anyone has forgotten, one of the main reasons for all this immigration after the Civil War was the consciousness of the part of businessmen that cheap labor and union busting go hand in hand. But we really should be more perceptive about root causes. In previous history almost anywhere, when immigrants whose culture is stressfully different from the host country get to a certain demographic “weight”, it is invariably trouble: All the (other) great empires fell apart from this. The US has had a vested interest in insisting that we are going to be the exception. However, the power of culture (in the Chinese sense) is greatly underestimated; the last 200 years of World conflicts could be seen as failed attempts by ethnic majorities to “assimilate” minorities. Even if they want to be assimilated, and they frequently don’t, cultures on the record are much stronger than the “Nations” that try to suppress them. Try reading Tacitus on the Germans, and you find that the “stereotypes” are still true after 2000 years! And they didn’t even have a “Nation” in all that time! Tragically, even when the immigrants want desperately to assimilate, they quite often simply don’t know how to do it.. It’s like an unhappy marriage: the parties may want to change into other people, but they just can’t do it. Nobody’s fault. disigny
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