More On Immigration

A column in today's New York Times explains, at least in part, the problem Republicans are having with immigration, as discussed by Linda Chavez in the San Diego Union-Tribune.

In the time that has passed since September 11, we have become like the proverbial generals who fight the current war as if they are fighting the last war all over again but with the knowledge they didn't have the first time.

What those proverbial generals don't take into account is that time has passed since that other war, developments have occurred and objectives (and methods for achieving those objectives) have changed.

It's true that the terrorist attacks made it necessary for us to take new precautions and erect new barriers. And the 9/11 Commission correctly pinpointed many of the deficiencies that made those attacks so ridiculously easy to carry out. Unfortunately, our government has failed to enact most of those reforms that were recommended by the 9/11 Commission and, thus, the loopholes remain wide open to be exploited again.

But Thomas Friedman of the Times is correct when he says America needs to regain its "old habits and sense of openness," and that's a big part of the problem with immigration policy.

America was built by immigrants. Most Americans come from immigrant stock. In fact, unless you're 100% Indian, you have at least a portion of immigrant blood running through your veins. So promoting policies that prevent entry into America for people who don't speak English or who don't look "American" enough (one Republican lawmaker famously suggested keeping out people with "diapers on their heads") frankly promotes the kind of country I didn't grow up in and certainly don't want to live in.

There are risks to that kind of openness, but there always have been. What is needed is common sense in our immigration policy, not bigotry and ignorance.

I don't always agree with Friedman, but he's absolutely right when he says that 9/11 "made us stupid." Our next president can't afford to forget the lessons we learned from the September 11 attacks. But our next president also can't afford to forget that there are certain things about America that made us stand tall for the rest of the world, and one of those things was our willingness to open our doors and our arms to people from throughout the world who wanted to come here to be free to be whatever they could be.

That's a quality of our national personality that we should never want to trade for security.