Today the New York Times published an op-ed by Ross Douthat, one of several conservative commentators who have poked the eye from time to time of the paper of record's mostly liberal readership. Setting aside the question of whether the Times is a Nazi publication, accusations of which abound on Twitter, I want to focus for now on Douthat's arguments. My subscription is safe, mainly because I believe in the wall separating news from opinion, and because, like it or not, the Times will continue to be an important national voice.
Douthat's piece is premised on a faulty notion: that there are immigration restrictionists who are not bigots. There may be some handful of people for which this may be true, but one only need take a cursory listen to the braying voices leading this charge, people like Tucker Carlson and Ann Coulter. We should never forget the outright lies that launched Trump's campaign. Mexico sends its worst. Mexicans are rapists. The tropes trotted out again and again have deeply racist overtones and are based on a deliberate ignorance of the facts. Immigrants are not more likely to commit crime or to be terrorists.
Douthat's argument is built on the terribly exhausting "economic anxiety" theory that may have some basis in fact, but does that justify using it as a negotiating lever? "A native working class gripped by social crisis might benefit from a little less wage competition for a while," Douthat writes, completely ignoring the fact that the jobs new immigrants take are typically not the ones "native" Americans want. Fear is ginned up on TV and talk radio against a vague threat of hordes of brown people who are going to steal our jobs, rape our women, and make us all eat tacos on every street corner. We have heard these fears before. The fact of the matter is that the average voter in so-called Trump country faces forces of globalization, automation, and lack of access to education and the internet that have nothing to do with immigration. The "social crisis" is real, evidenced by the opioid epidemic, high suicide rates, and decreasing rates of social mobility. Perhaps we ought to look at staggering income inequality before we blame foreigners for our self-made problems.
We are being asked in this column to admit a racist to the negotiating table because some segment of the electorate is racist. Douthat would have us believe that anything else is "punting" on policy. How quickly he forgets that just a few short years ago, the bi-partisan gang of eight Senators was ready to put an immigration deal together. DACA is roundly popular and would pass a national referendum today. GOP senators like North Carolina's Thom Tillis want to have it both ways. On the one hand, he wants to make vague overtures toward consensus and working across the aisle. However, when push comes to shove, he won't risk alienating the base (read, racists) that he thinks he needs to stay in power. What a shame. Tillis barely defeated incumbent Kay Hagan, a moderate, only after a last-minute play using $5 million in dark money. Too bad he can't see the big picture and make a bid for the moderates in our state, most of whom would accept immigration reform that was humane and fair.
Scapegoating the other in order to find solace in societal or personal ills is nothing new; it's what the rise of Hitler, Franco, Stalin, and Mussolini was all about. Douthat correctly analyzes that part of the problem. But his solution, to admit this kind of dangerous, hateful thinking into rational discourse is misguided and frankly shocking. If we don't hold the line somewhere, on something, then who are we? Yes, standing up to Sessions, Miller, Trump, and their cast of Fox News enablers may doom real reform for now, and that is a shame. But making a deal with the devil will not get us anything workable down the line, and only opens the door for more "theory" based in lies and racism to achieve normalization.
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