Ma also knew where she wanted to be: America. America! It would be all Europe wasn't. Here she could be who she was,
without apology, or on sufferance. In that sense, she was American before
she ever disembarked at the Port of Boston, on February 10, 1921. There
wasn't a fence in the world that was going to keep that 19-year-old girl,
traveling alone, out of this country.
I saw a picture on television the other day, one of those grainy shots of an
illegal who'd just climbed over the fence. Finally on American soil,
exhausted, still peering about anxiously, but alive, hopeful, grateful, he
stopped to cross himself. I thought of Ma.
How do you quantify that kind of absolute determination, absolute faith?
Point system, shmoint system. And that was only the beginning of the
problems with this bill. There was its length, its complexity, its obscurity
Š and its encouraging the growth here of a class of guest workers,
European-style - people who would never qualify as citizens but stay here as
aliens for economic reasons.
If immigrants want to be in America but not of it, we can't use 'em - no
matter how valuable their economic skills. There's something a lot more
valuable then material wealth: unreserved loyalty. Not keeping one foot
here, the other there.
Then there was the bill's requirement that illegal immigrants who want to
set out on the path to citizenship go home to apply for re-entry. Come on.
Report to be deported? Would you?
Yes, we need to fine and penalize those who have violated our laws and come
here illegally. We need to know who these people are and where they are and
what they're doing. Most of all, we need to set them on the path to legal,
full-fledged citizenship - but not ahead of all those who are following the
rules and have waited, for years, to get in.
Far from allowing too much immigration, this bill wouldn't allow enough.
Around the world, the most determined, ambitious, hard-working and
congenitally hopeful people in the world are dying to get into this country,
sometimes literally. We are turning our backs on the most valuable form of
wealth ever offered a nation: human capital.
Nor did this bill sufficiently emphasize education for immigrants -
education in English, in civics, and generally in what we were once allowed
to call Americanism. I'm all for the wonderful mosaic of cultures in this
country - social, religious, linguistic, culinary and every other kind in
this country of countries. Each contributes something to the way we all see
things, think about things. We learn from each other. But here there is room
for only one, indivisible, unhyphenated civic culture. A civic and civil
culture that gives us a common tongue to argue in, and common ground to
stand on. E pluribus unum, it used to be said:
From out of many, one. Not from one, many.
So why settle for a cockamamie immigration bill with its point-shmoint
system and all the rest of its faults, dangers and unknowns? For the same
reason Benjamin Franklin was for another hodgepodge of provisions he wasn't
exactly thrilled about, another Great Bargain that was more a vague and
untested scheme. It was the deal concocted at a convention held in
Philadelphia during the steaming summer heat of 1787: the Constitution of
the United States.
The Fourth of July is a good day to re-read Mr. Franklin's final address to
the delegates to that convention. It is one of the wisest tributes to the
spirit of compromise in a republic ever delivered.
Why would a practical, experienced old sage like Ben Franklin go along with
such a vague, dubious system with all its soon to be discovered faults?
Because it was a system, rather than the loose, deteriorating non-system,
more entropy than energy, that it would replace.
Those senators who voted against this immigration bill were in effect voting
to keep what we have now: a non-system, an amnesty in practice that grows
uglier, more dangerous, more unjust and exploitative and anarchic every year
it's allowed to persist, rather than a hopeful step, however shaky, towards
a more perfect Union.