The Immigration Bill and the Big Picture

 It is, as  writes, an outrage when the governing classes try to rush a major revision of the nation’s immigration law past the voters and past their legislators without what our liberal friends call “a national conversation.”

He has thoughtfully provided a critique of the Senate bill as it became available over the weekend.

Today he has listed a number of proposed amendments to the bill.  One of them is to establish a special category of aliens from jihadist countries.  No quick Z-visa for them!

 In the frenzy of day-to-day political combat, let us not forget the big picture.  It was one of President Eisenhower’s maxims that if he couldn’t see the solution to a problem he tried to make it bigger.

The big picture is that we are in the middle of a great human migration, perhaps the greatest ever since modern humans first crossed the Straits of Hormuz 50,000 years ago and spread across the whole world.

Today’s great migration is from the country to the city.  In China at this moment, about 25 million people are moving to the city each year. 

Not surprisingly, people are migrating to the best city they know about.  For many Mexicans the best place to go is not Mexico City or Monterrey.  As one Mexican immigrant said to me from the driver’s seat of his mammoth Chevy Suburban SUV: “In Mexico you have to pay someone to get a job.”

So they come to the great job-creating cities of the United States.

For us, this is all very well.  Just don’t all come at once.

It is the job of of our government, legislators, executive, and judges, to control the flow of immigration so that it does not create hardships for the American people.  We care about the Mexican people, of course.  But first we must take care of our own.

So the job of the government is to control, channel, and limit the flow.  That is something that the government has clearly not been doing very well at all.

That is why folks like Hugh Hewitt are right when they insist that before we start handing out amnesty to illegal immigrants the government must demonstrate that it has gotten control of the borders.