The Easy Way Out
President Trump gave a speech to the nation last night. ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, FOX CNN and MSNBC all gave him prime time. The rumor beforehand was that the President planned to declare a “national emergency” at the border, getting extraordinary powers to “build the wall.” No network was going to ignore that news.
He didn’t do that. He simply reiterated his case for building a steel-slat not beautiful concrete wall. He used blatantly misleading and inaccurate statistics, then tried to scare us with horror stories about murders committed by illegal immigrants.
Then Speaker Pelosi and Minority Leader Schumer spoke, looking for all-the-world like Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” painting as they stood side by side at the podium. They fact-checked the President, and blamed the shutdown on him. While they weren’t wrong, they also weren’t particularly convincing.
So, if you tried to be “open-minded” last night, and didn’t turn off the “other side,” in the end neither side won. It did manage to disrupt Tuesday night prime-time TV, the best night of the week – don’t mess with NCIS!
After the speeches, social media lit up. I read post after post by my Republican friends, saying that Democrats were for “open borders” and refusing to defend AMERICA. My more extreme “friends” spoke of Democratic conspiracies to get illegals to vote, or vague alliances between drug cartels and the Democratic Party.
I am a Democratic, and a liberal, and definitely have a minority view for where I live. So I need to make it clear what the Democratic position is.
I am not for uncontrolled borders, where anyone can wander across. Any nation has the “right” to determine who comes in or out, and the US is no different. I am also not in favor of unlimited immigration, where anyone can enter the US and stay. And I am certainly not in favor of drugs or humans being trafficked across the border.
I am in favor of security at the border. We are now technically capable of checking the contents of trucks and vehicles with electronic devices to find the 90% of illegal drugs that are coming across at LEGAL entry points. We need to spend the money to do this, even though I do believe that the answers to our drug problems are on the “user” side. We won’t stop illegal drug use until we find a way to get people to stop using.
I am in favor of a strong Border Patrol, keeping track of what’s happening on our border. That Patrol needs the latest electronic means of surveillance, and needs to be able to adapt to the changing geography at our border. In urban areas, barriers make sense, in the middle of Big Bend National Park in Texas, where the Rio Grande serves as the boundary, drones and helicopters make more sense.
That Border Patrol has to be more than just about enforcement, but also must serve as a rescue service for those who try to cross the border wilderness. That includes emergency medical care, as well as food and water.
I am in favor of an Immigration Service that focuses on those who are illegally in the United States and are criminals. There seems to be plenty of them, so they should leave the undocumented who are working, living, and thriving here alone. If gangs are the problem, then they should focus their efforts on them. Raiding chicken processing plants and setting up undocumented mothers makes them look like some kind of un-American secret police.
And I am in favor of a humane policy at the border. We should recognize the desperation of migrants who have literally walked thousands of miles to escape the intolerable conditions of their homes. We should welcome them, care for them, and determine whether they should be granted asylum. Our current policy is driving them to act illegally, risking their family’s lives to step on US soil.
We should be getting to the root of the problem, the issues in Central America of poverty and gang violence and corruption. Like the drug problem being more about users than suppliers, the migration problem starts at the source. Dealing with that would be a great use of our funds.
And we should deal with the Dreamers and immigration reform as a whole, without the current overtones of racism. The blatant fear of “brown people” that emanates from the White House degrades the American dream. We need to fix that.
This all means that “the Wall” is not only a waste of money, but also not a solution to the problem. We need a nuanced and complex approach, one that hiding behind concrete, or steel-slats, won’t fix.
So that’s where I stand. And that’s where the Democratic Party stands as well, so stop falling for the propaganda of “memes” on Facebook, or scare tactics by our President. Americans can deal with complex problems, whether it’s health care or going to the moon. We need to do the hard work of solving the problem, not fall for the simplistic solutions don’t work. They make for great “sound bites” on network news, or audience chants at campaign rallies, but the “easy way out” — never is.
