OBAMA AND IMMIGRATION

IT USED TO BE

The President wants lawmakers to make immigration a priority.

That’s a good idea.

Although We now have so many problems facing Us that even if he came up with a good idea for each of them (and don’t forget that some of them are interconnected, ‘synergistically related’ as the wonks like to say)the Hononrable Congress is going to have a time thinking its way through them. Especially since the standard operating procedure on the Hill for a couple-three decades is simply to sit back, see which PAC contributes the most or which Identity threatens the most, and go where Greed and Fear lead you. It’s not the height of maturity – but in a ‘sensitive’ America who wants to hate-on them or ruin their self-esteem (if it’s even possible to dent the self-esteem of a sitting national politician).

“It’s going to require some heavy lifting” he says. Marvelous. When was the last time they were told that in the Beltway? The only heavy lifting they’ve had to do is shaking hands and collecting checks from PACs and pandering to too-interested lobbies and advocacies of pained and noisy Identities.

The whole idea thirty-plus years ago was that they would never have to do any heavy-lifting again. They made a stint in Congress into a classier equivalent of the old ethnic ‘getting on the city’ gambit, where the award of a city job for services-rendered to a pol or simply by being an annoying but essential in-law of his meant that one would never have to really work again. It’s very heaven, in a flat-souled, porcine way.

Thus the Dems retained their electability by raising up Identities around this or that ‘fear and outrage’, and then granting the advocacies and lobbies for those blocs whatever they ‘demanded’; while simultaneously raking in the cash from the PACs that Tip O’Neill had invented specifically for the purpose: corporations, lobbyists, hell even foreign countries (that bumptious ‘ally’ on the far shore of the Mediterranean) could get in on the act if they were willing to pay to play. The Reagan-Clinton-Bush the Lesser years made the two administrations of Ulysses Grant look like a church picnic for the hopelessly imagination-challenged.

But then, courtesy of all the deconstruction work going on, there were no challenges to the imagination: nothing could stop a fantasy fueled by greed or the lust for power and influence and control. There was no ‘morality’ (that had to go in order to grease the skids for the abortion agenda); nobody could ‘judge’ you (that had to go in order to make room for all the alternative and ‘creative’ lifestyles and life-choices); nobody could say they disapproved of you even if they did judge you (that had to go in order to squelch public resistance to all the new pandered demands); nobody – frankly – could tell you what to do with your own life (that had to go in order to make room for abortion, but the concept migrated quickly to issues dearer to the place-holders on the Hill: they couldn’t be ‘judged’ for cementing themselves into place in their Districts).

Nor, having paid, did any of the players really want to see whole new bunches of Honorable Electees trooping into town, who would have to be paid and broken-in all over again.

If the honorable generals and admirals made robust use of the Pentagon revolving door, their erstwhile bosses on the Hill entrenched and fortified for a permanent occupation. Perhaps the most expensive political boondoggle facility isn’t in the Green Zone in Baghdad, but somewhat closer to home.

So what about immigration then?

I have no answers.

But it seems to me that We should start approaching these little political matters not as soap-operas but as police procedurals. Nor do I mean such high-production-value but egregiously phantasmagoric shows like Bellisario’s pair about the JAGs and the so Freudianly-aptly named Naval Criminal Investigative Service.

No. I’m thinking more along the lines – let me date myself – of ‘Hawaii 5-0’, ‘Kojak’, and ‘Columbo’. And with a hefty dose of Darren McGavin’s ‘Night Stalker’ as well. In other words, turning a gimlet eye on the ‘narrative’ that ‘it’s all good and there’s nothing to see here’, and start kicking those tires so you can answer accurately the basic question of who would benefit and who had opportunity, all the while deftly sidestepping all of the assorted stories, press releases, and fake evidence planted in your path by party or parties as yet unknown.

So in this immigration thing – again, I have no answers nor pretend to – I would say that any professional lists of those-with-motive would have to include the following:

The Democrats, who would benefit by bringing in fresh new voters who would be either so grateful to be here, or so unaware of how things used to work in this country, or so used to how things used to work in their own countries of origin, that they would simply vote happily for them what brung’em to the dance.

The radical ideological feminist movement, who would hasten the death of that ‘America’ associated with and tainted by ‘white, industrial-era males’ and all their dripping violence and lumpen macho rationality, by bringing in whole bunches of folks who – being ‘poor’ and ‘oppressed’ (somehow) and therefore ‘good’ - would before long cancel out the hateful white, industrial-era male dinosaurs, their world and their civilization, with all its oppressive adulthood, maturity, and aspiration – however shaky – to some amount of virtue.

The radical ideological feminist movement, who would allay the fears of scientists and pols who feared a demographic flat-line of zero-reproductive replacement (all those abortions that liberated women would be flocking to get) by ‘keeping the numbers up’ through immigration. And of course, those immigrants would soon quickly start having kids who would not know the way the once-but-maybe-not-future Republic was designed to work, and then that generation would have kids … and so on.

The radical ideological feminist movement, who would need a lot of nannies for all those liberated women who would be taking high-paying executive jobs and would need somebody to take care of the kids, if either hubby was also employed or there was no hubby. Also for leaf-blowers, gardeners, pool-persons, and younger folks who would be day-laborers for the contractors who would be building, installing and maintaining the McMansions, lawns, gardens, and pools.

The Republicans who would need a lot of those same nannies, leaf-blowers, gardeners, pool-boys, and younger folks who would be day-laborers for the contractors who would be building, installing and maintaining the McMansions, lawns, gardens, and pools.*

The corporations who would be needing a whole lot of cheap and pliable labor to break the unions and essentially dissolve the New Deal and the Detroit Consensus. For which purpose the Democrats, under the tag-team of Clinton and Clinton, and the Democratic Leadership Council, and others as yet unindicted, did deliberately fabricate and provide the ‘cover’ theory of ‘globalization’. The afore-mentioned theory did deliberately and with malice afore-thought misrepresent as merely a way for American corporations to produce goods more cheaply abroad, what really was a scheme that resulted in not only the jobs but the profits of the production going and remaining overseas. For which many PACs were gratefully rewarded by those few who profited greatly.

And the ‘new economy’ entrepreneurs whose job market – burdened by the overnight doubling of the potential workforce that needed to be employed by the ‘liberation’ of women – required that salaries be correspondingly chopped in half and benefits reduced, for which purposes a wholly new workforce, unfamiliar with the old ‘industrial-era’ status of steadily and well-remunerated employed workers, would most suitably answer.

And, lastly, the entire Beltway association of elected pols, who stood to gain immensely from a citizenry largely ignorant of the responsibilities of The People and of the role of the individual Citizen, or too pre-occupied with earning a meager living to learn, or too fearful of biting the hand that fed them to object to whatever their new master-government chose to do.

Well, that’s my initial list of suspects. It isn’t complete, but it should provide enough to start Our investigation.

Now, mind you, I am not saying that every single individual immigrant is going to fall into all these characterizations. I’m saying that this was the way the suspect-perpetrators would have imagined their plan would work out, by and large.

And in those expectations, I think they were correct.

Nor can We forget that many of those desperately seeking entrance were utterly undone by the effects of the afore-mentioned ‘globalization’, that wrecked their livelihoods in their own countries of origin.

So many Clintonian turkeys coming home – or at least here – to roost, as it were.

Nor can We forget that while such deconstruction was going on in this country and against its People, the Reagan-era stratagem, begun under Nixon the decade before when the currency was cut loose from the realism of the gold standard, was to provide the appearance of ‘wealth’ for all by enabling easy credit. Which credit was provided by other nations’ purchase of Our debt in the form of Treasury bonds, while Our new ‘knowledge’ society produced nothing but a few ‘ideas’ (famously inedible) and mountain-ranges worth of paper ‘instruments’ of increasing complexity and increasingly dubious integrity.

Nor can We forget that We allowed Ourselves to be thus seduced, indenturing Ourselves and Our posterity unto the umpteenth-generation with debt uncountable.

So that at this point immigrants are invited into – or invite themselves into – a country that has no means of providing them either with a living wage or with the reliable promise of sustained employment.

Nor can We forget that the nation for which the Statue of Liberty was cast and to which it was presented as a gift, was a nation bursting with a potential that required the labor of as many willing hands as it could find (and its Democratic benefactors could entice). And that it would be an indication of the most profound imbecility if the Democrats of recent decades imagined that they could simply run the same play that had worked a century before.

Nor can We forget that fully a third of the Italians – to take one example – who entered at Ellis Island returned to their home country for good, having realized that the American streets were not only not paved with gold, but were actually built on filth and blood even more than on honest sweat and toil.

We are not in a position to be making any promises. Nor is America any longer the fabled Land of Promise.

So I’d say that – yes – some heavy-lifting is indeed required.

NOTE

*When I use the terms “Republicans” I do not mean the party of Teddy Roosevelt, sticking up for the environment and for regular folks against the corporations, “the interests”, and the “malefactors of great wealth”. It was the Reagan ‘genius’ to use fake money fueled by increasing debt to make everybody think that they were now part of the ‘wealthy’ class; so that what was done for the malefactors was – according to the illusory ‘narrative’ – done for everybody. Nor did the Dems find this a baaaad thing, and they declared themselves ‘bipartisan’ forthwith, to hide the fact of their treacherous collusion and – let’s face it – collaboration. They were, after all, the inventors of PACs in the first place.