Douthat's Wrong About CIR

Actually, he's wrong about a great many things.  But this in particular.  Let me refute his major points.

First, the Hispanic population in the United States (documented and otherwise) is already growing fast enough to have shifted the political balance of power in a number of red-to-purple states, such as California, Florida, Nevada, Colorado, and even Arizona.  Sorry, Ross, but the GOP doesn't have the luxury of waiting four decades before it surrenders its absolute allegiance to the Anglo vote.  A new generation is coming of age, and that generation is already operating the levers of power (and registering new voters all the time).

Second, yes, of course, Hispanics are people (glad you noticed!) and hence not single-issue voters.  African-Americans are people too, but they've been "demonized" into the Democratic Party by white Republican politics that pushed the race button over and over again.  This is why the Hispanic vote is trending Democratic; Hispanics being people, they recognize demonization when they see it.  And Democrats, frankly, have a broader range of social-issue positions among their leaders than Republicans do.  At least they're not reading people out of the party over their positions on abortion.

Third, virtually all of the so-called anti-immigrant sentiment in the Democratic Party comes from labor unions.  Guess what?  Your success in neutralizing them just makes it easier for the Democrats to recruit immigrant voters through the passage of CIR.

Finally, CIR is both more necessary and preferable to piecemeal legislation (e.g., the DREAM Act or the recapturing of unused visa numbers) because it is fundamentally unfair and, in any case, impossible to ignore the presence of 12 million or more undocumented human beings in our midst.  The vast majority of them entered lawfully, and remained unlawfully in no small measure because of a system that was designed for an economy that no longer exists, one in which the vast majority of people grow up, work and grow old in the country in which they are born. 

We have a global economy, but only as it relates to money, which moves around the world at the speed of light.  People, on the other hand, move around the world at the speed of sludge.  If anything, we need not only CIR but a global treaty in which as many nations as possible joined together to share the burdens and benefits of true international mobility.  We absolute do NOT need a United States in which individual states (are you listening, Jan Brewer and your friends in Georgia and Alabama?) practice bigotry and economic suicide in the name of exercising sovereign powers they do not have.

I get it, Ross.  You and your Reagan-era friends want to go back to a Borax-colored world of happy white people, one in which everyone else knows his or her "place."  Well, America is there place.  And they're staying.  And they're voting.  And they're NOT voting for you.