How To Start With 2010?

Well, let's try this. It's the best assessment of Obama's first year I've seen yet.

May your new year bring you health, safety, and the chance to make a difference. And, above all, no repeat of the 1994 elections (pu! pu! pu! as my wife would say, and knock on would as I would say).

Not to mention comprehensive immigration reform. Perhaps unlikely, but the politics of immigration are bipartisan on both sides of the issue. Racist Republicans and union Democrats are against CIR, while business Republicans and human-rights Democrats are for it. To get some idea of how the issue seems to straddle the ideologues, instead of the other way around, consider this from The New York Post. The Post's business writers tend to be a little saner than the rest of the paper (family-values editorials and topless-bar ads).

What's interesting is that the author seems indirectly to be arguing for expanding the so-called "au pair visa" to include elder-care workers. I have to wonder how he feels about the fact that Congress has failed to issue new visa numbers (or recapture unused ones from prior years) for employment-based green cards that would give opportunities to elder-care workers from other countries. I can testify to the value of the workers who benefit from these visa numbers, not only professionally but also personally, based on the care my father received from several of them during the last several months of his life in nursing homes.

I am a very strong believer that the true wealth of nations begins not with the so-called captains of industry (too many of them are more like Captain Queeg than Captain Kirk), but with the foot soldiers of its everyday workers, whether employed or self-employed. There's really no way of addressing our current economic issues without addressing the fact that we need immigrants as much as they need the United States. We need their energy, their loyalty, their creativity, their resources, their connections, and (yes) their patriotism. I'm not denying that immigration reform necessarily means addressing issues of national security and criminal justice. The fact remains, however, that we live in a world in which money moves around the world at the speed of light. Why should the people who make, spend, save and invest it be force to move around it at less than the speed of sludge?

I hope that this state of affairs changes in 2010. And, above all, I hope that, as a nation, we can argue and gawk less, and think and build more. Happy New Year!