(Added most of this great piece to There's Moresville - promoted by johne)
Politically, I don't usually agree with the Denver Post's David Harsanyi - but the guy has a really important point in today's paper about the "debate" that happened over immigration recently. "A debate typically entails two sides hashing out an issue with facts, rebuttals and so on," he writes. "Not here. It was like watching my grandparents discuss dinner plans." Exactly - and there's a reason why a real debate never happened. Because a real debate would force the money-drenched political Establishment to confront the very questions it is designed to avoid - the questions of economic inequality that corporate interests want swept under the rug.
In the interest of preventing redundancy, let me just repost an excerpt of what I wrote a little more than a year ago in a column for the San Francisco Chronicle:
Amid all the rhetoric in the superheated immigration debate, many have forgotten the key question: Why? Why do so many Mexicans want to come to America in the first place?...Many Mexicans are willing to risk their lives to enter the United States illegally because they are desperate to find a better life. In supply-and-demand terms, the supply of jobs in Mexico that one can subsist on is far less than the demand for such jobs...This is the supply-and-demand reality that no amount of emotional rhetoric can change - and in that reality we can find the way to address illegal immigration: by stopping the demand instead of trying to block the supply. The Academy Award-winning movie, "Traffic," highlighted the perils of waging a drug war that only focuses on trying to block the supply of narcotics, rather than on eliminating the demand for them. These same lessons can be applied to illegal immigration. The best way to stop illegal entry into our country from Mexico is to tamp down the demand by Mexicans to enter this country illegally. After all, no wall, no fence, no border security measure can be as effective as reducing the demand for entry. This means reforming our trade policy to include serious wage, workplace and human-rights provisions so that cross-border commerce actually improves the lives of Mexican workers to the point where they no longer feel the dire economic need to break our immigration laws. Think about it this way: Had NAFTA lifted 19 million Mexicans out of poverty as promised instead of helping to drive 19 million Mexicans into poverty, you can bet the flood of illegal immigrants across our southern border would be a trickle instead of the flood it is today.
During the immigration "debate," there was almost no discussion of America's trade policy or how to reform it (and our foreign aid program) to economically lift up neighboring countries like Mexico. Why? Because trade policy is seen in Washington as the exclusive purview of corporate lobbyists - it is not looked at as a human issue. These trade pacts are really investor rights agreements - and ones that have long enjoyed the support of both parties and the Wall Street financiers who underwrite them. They are designed first and foremost to create desperate economic conditions in both America and in Mexico. The more desperation, the lower the wages, the more pressure to reduce environmental protection and the better able employers are to bust unions. The last thing those Democrats, Republicans and corporate lobbyists who crafted NAFTA wanted was a trade policy that actually lifted up Mexico's economy - because if that happened, there wouldn't be a cheap labor pool to exploit.
Even Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) refuses to address how the manipulation of our trade policy exacerbates the problem of illegal immigration he purports to care so much about. When he has questioned our trade policy, he has questioned only its non-economic provisions - but he has carefully stayed away from the more fundamental - and well-documented - criticism of how our existing policy exacerbates Latin American poverty and thus drives up pressure at our border.
I'm guessing Harsanyi, a conservative, doesn't agree with my fundamental critique of our existing trade policy. But I'd like to hope that he and others across the ideological spectrum can agree that the debate over immigration policy has to be over more than just walls, border patrols and paths to citizenship for those already here - it has to be about what is driving the entire situation.
The immigration "debate" we just had was not a debate - it was political theater, and bad political theater at that. If we want to really address the immigration question, we are going to need political leaders that are courageous enough to ask the real question - the questions of why.
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