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Part II: Republican Immigration Disaster and a Democratic President We Can't Elect

[ Posted On: 2007-01-27 ]

The Republican Immigration Disaster Changed Leadership in Congress

When we X-ray the anatomy of the Republican defeat in the last midterm election we have an eye-catching reading of the following: GOP's immigration disaster, the American public's desperate need for change, and Americans voting against the Republicans, not necessarily voting for the Democrats because they think they are more likable or smarter and more honest than the Republicans.

The final reading of the results of this political X-ray is that, now that Congress is in the disposal of the Democrats, a Democrat President the likes of Sen. Joe Liebermann of Connecticut is what Americans may want to elect in the forthcoming 2008 presidential election, but may not get elected because the Democrats got it all wrong!

The new leadership in Congress could build the likelihood of a Democrat President in 2008 while the Republicans are still reeling over the political disaster they sustained in the last midterm election, more specifically on the issue of immigration reform.

In Part I of this editorial insight, [1] I wrote that prior to the last midterm election, thoughtless mean Republicans had angered millions of Latinos and immigrants in the country when among many other disturbing mistakes they have committed, they abused their congressional power, i.e., they tried to pass an omnibus immigration reform law that would categorize more than twelve million undocumented immigrants across the country as "criminals", and as fugitive of justice hunt down some 40 million more of them all over the country, arrest them, haul them to concentration camps because jails are not big enough, and shoot them as criminals if they resist arrest.

Almost bordering in insanity, such mind-boggling 'anti-immigrant jingoism' occupies the topmost list of American abhorrence of a political party in power in the history of the United States that Americans in casting their ballots couldn't wait to kick out of office.

President Bush has foreseen this Republican disaster in the last midterm election and attempted to mollify the angry millions of Latinos and millions of their immigrant sympathizers across the country by creating a compromised Temporary Workers Program [TWP] for the gradual integration of undocumented immigrants into our society. But the Republicans were the first to attack him, calling TWR an amnesty that they loathed to give to even deserving immigrants. They competed to tear down TWP to pieces and in a hail of criticism gobbled Bush wantonly like sharks in a feeding frenzy.

As we can all now see, the Republicans were ill-fated to lose the last national election. The result is the emergence of the current Democratic leadership in Congress.

There were written drops of crocodile tears for the Republicans, arguing that they were only trying to solve our perennial immigration problems. Shouldn't we solve those humongous national problems on immigration before we turn ourselves into a nation of illegal immigrants?

Of course the Republicans were honestly trying to address our immigration problems. Of course we should solve these problems, but in God's name, not in this vengeful manner, not in this irrational and inhuman way.

It was argued that illegal aliens that are criminals are crossing our borders and commit crimes in this country. Illegal aliens entering the country threatened our national security.

Of course we are dealing with them, but not as immigrants - the important point that the proponents of this argument missed terribly. We should be dealing with them the way we go after criminals, not the way we go after immigrants under our immigration laws. We should be dealing with terrorists that enter our borders in no different way we deal with the terrors of Islamic fundamentalism and Al Qaeda under our homeland security laws, not the way we deal with immigrants, legal or otherwise, under our immigration laws.

I fully understand the legitimate outrage of those mortified with what some illegal aliens are doing in this country. But this outrage while reasonable is wrongly reasoned out. It is blinded into a retaliatory mean-spiritedness. For instance, starving the millions of the poorest population of this country and their children by withdrawing social benefits because they are suspected as immigrants that could have entered the country illegally is contrary to our American values. It is definitely not the American way of dealing with our immigration problem.

We are a benevolent nation. We pour billions of dollars annually around the world to help people in dire need before they starve to death and perish in war for lack of educational, economic and political infrastructures that out of our humanitarian generosity we committed ourselves to provide to make this planet a better place to live in. And here at home to do the opposite is certainly not what this nation wants.

Every year our solutions to this complex, multi-dimensional immigration problem are getting better and better. Enforcing our immigration laws and policing the border with additional armed complements, increasing the number of our border patrols with volunteer civic organizations like the Minutemen and others working with them, are positives steps we have taken among others, to at least minimize the gravity and dilute the deleterious effects of this perennial national problem in our way of life. It is a problem that we carry on our back, similar to the biblical Cross that Jesus Christ carried on his back to Mt. Calvary, for many years now. It is not just a political football that opportunistic politicians like to play, and as rooting fans, we tend to immensely enjoy.

Our determination to prevent the entry of illegal immigrants is indomitable, even to the extent of erecting miles and miles of border walls that has never been tried nor thought of before. The purpose is almost akin to the isolationist thinking of Ancient China in constructing The Great China Wall, and that of the modern, socialist Marxist ideology behind the construction of the Berlin Wall.

To me it is ridiculous to build a kind of China Wall or Berlin Wall along our elongated border with Mexico in this technologically-awash civilization of the millennium. But as I wrote down before in several editorials my incredulity of, more than my protestation to, this solution to our immigration problem, its inability and therefore futility in preventing the entry of illegal aliens into this country would make the Wall symbolic of our dogged determination to find the answer to this illegal alien dilemma even to the point of being ridiculous. The Wall is my answer to those who hurl the hurtful accusation that this nation doesn't care about solving our immigration problem. We would rather let the world know that we are committed to address this problem with anything possible, using anything within our means, and in whatever manner we could think of.

The gargantuan cost of constructing the Wall is threatening, but we are willing and ready to commit our resources in accordance with the disposition and better judgment of our politically empowered men and women in Congress. We must give them time to mull over the problem and give us the results that we want to see, over time.

We must understand - unfortunately a great number of us don't - that to implement any of those measures is to open new collateral problems in the other dimensional front of the main problem, both political and economics that we have also to tackle at the same time. We have to address the complaints of entrepreneurs that benefited from the use of cheap labor in the industrial and agricultural sectors, not just scream at them; there is the issue of funding that could dig a whole in our pockets through taxation, resources we need that could adversely affect existing service programs, etc.; there is the political problem that those measures create that we have to iron out with Mexico, and finally the issue of the legal challenge when existing social, educational and medical benefits are withdrawn or the granting thereof is restricted or redefined, just to cite a few examples. Attending to all these is not a wink-of-an-eye undertaking that we have to jump-start with.

The immigration problem of this nation that we are talking about is so complex that to think that we are dealing with kid stuff in demanding an overnight solution is bordering in lunacy. But as I said, our approach to the problem is getting better year after year. This year and last year, we are better than we were the year before that, and the year before that, we were better, so forth and so on.

In all of those years up to this year when we are getting better and better for trying, never did we try the inhuman approach that the Republicans with attitudinal murder in mind towards immigrants had so far attempted to do that cost them the last midterm election.

Trust me … in the long run we, the enduring American people, will overcome these immigration problems that had been with us for so long. To be hostile to one another, to be inhuman in our problem-solving approaches to the dilemma, to be divided is not the road we should take to get to that end.

We need an electable leader to lead us to achieving that ultimate goal. I think of a Democrat President who can forge a New Deal with the Republicans for this country to move forward. I am an avid admirer of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. We need a leader to deal with divisiveness and heal the wounds of a divided nation.

We need a Republican statesman like the great Abraham Lincoln who is a "unifier," not a divider, to bring back this divided country into one government of the people, for the people and by the people. We are still in some kind of a civil war where racial prejudice kills.

We need a leader from the Republican side that believed in the people's freedom that could be compromised to the need of national security and their safety for survival when the nation is under attack or when the country is facing a deadly imminent danger, or when the final choice is to survive or perish. We need to win the war in Iraq, to secure our homeland.
But today those days of Roosevelt and Lincoln are hard to come by. The coming 2008 presidential election seemed bereft of candidates that could at least approximate the greatness of Roosevelt and Lincoln.

In the Republican side, it is hard for the American public to choose Sen. John McCain for President, although he is a compassionate and a smart leader. To appease the delirious folly of his anti-immigrant colleagues in Congress, he attempted to lead the harsh campaign against undocumented immigrants. I would vote for him but I doubt if the huge outraged Latino and immigrant voters would.

The likes of double-talking Democrat Sen. Barack Obama are even remotely distanced from the public trust. The latest infamous double-talk attributed to him was his public declaration that the Democrat Congress "would not undercut troops already in Iraq," but would "restrict the President from expanding the mission" in Iraq. Not to undercut but also to restrict is a covert double talk that many believed insults the intelligence of the American public.

McCain and Obama could be typical of "non-electable" candidates for President [and here I sincerely hope I am wrong] because of publicly perceived opportunistic tendencies that these potential candidates publicly manifest. They could not afford to hurt the support of their respective political parties, even though their heart is for the interest of the American people. They are intellectual realists: between the interest of the American people and that of their political party, they would choose the latter because of their known addiction to "political correctness", which in a word, opportunism. They would not choose the interest of the people if without party support it would mean a possible defeat in the election.

The American public will see this kind of "political correctness" as something not good for the country. Aside from intelligence and the charisma of a born leader, the presidential wannabe who puts the interest of the country above his personal and party interest is most likely a state of the art choice of the intelligent voting public. He could be a crusading neutral Democrat or Republican.

The American public has noticed this quality in Sen. Joe Liebermann, a respected Democrat from Connecticut, for quite sometime. This senator crosses party lines when he addresses a critical issue like the war in Iraq. He went to Iraq and saw the truth about the war in Iraq, and spoke to the American public of what he saw in Iraq. What he saw in Iraq was the gains we have made, not just what we lost, and the senator reported to the American people that we need more troops to win the war in Iraq.

If not for the negative difference that I have just stated, McCain and Liebermann are almost the same. They both saw the progress of our efforts in Iraq not just our drawback and both reported this to the American people. Both recommended the need for more troops to win the war in Iraq, even before President Bush conceived the troop surge plan of more than 21,000 strong to be deployed in Iraq. Both announced to the American public their findings and conclusion that it is a complete disaster if we lose the war in Iraq.

Considering the slight deviation in the comparison that I have just demonstrated, Liebermann therefore has but a little edge over McCain.

In the case of Liebermann, the big problem is, the Democrats didn't like Liebermann's honesty, and reject the senator's preference of the interest of the country over that of the interest of the Democratic Party, the DMC short of disowning him outright in the last midterm election. To the Democratic Party, Liebermann is politically incorrect.

It clearly tells us in unmistakable terms that the next President of the United States could be a Democrat like Sen. Lieberman, but may not get elected because the Liberal leadership went on tilt and got it all wrong.#

Reference:

[1] Sumcad, Edwin, A, Draining The Swamp: Democrats' Index Finger Points At GOP But The Thumb Points At Them -- American Chronicle, November 29, 2006
http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=17271

© Copyright Edwin A. Sumcad. Access January 26, 2007.

Article Source: http://www.afroarticles.com/article-dashboard

About The Author: Edwin A. Sumcad is a veteran diplomat-journalist and for more than 45 years a recipient of numerous excellence awards in journalism. His editorial insights appear in other publications and published in several websites. A brief comment may be e-mailed to ed.superx722[at]yahoo.com.sg. [Please replace [at] with @]

| View Profile & All Articles By: Edwin A. Sumcad |

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