Why we can't "just get along"
Maybe it’s the holiday spirit or maybe it’s the fact that neither political party did well in last month’s election. Whatever the reason, I’m seeing lots of articles calling for “solutions” both sides should agree to and claiming that the divisions in America don’t run nearly as deep as many suppose.
I understand these sentiments. When it comes to specifics, however, they give rise to wishful, and rather muddled, thinking.
I’ll cite two examples. First up, the Tillis-Sinema immigration bill.
This legislation would appropriate tens of billions of dollars to improve border security and to speed up the processing of asylum requests. In addition, there would be a year-long extension of Title 42’s Covid-era immigration enforcement measures. Finally, the bill would provide “dreamers” — immigrants who came here illegally as youths with their parents — a ten-year path to citizenship.
A proposal that truly secured the border while providing dreamers with a path to citizenship would be worthy of support, in my opinion. The problem is that Tillis-Sinema would deliver only one side of this bargain. Dreamers would end up getting citizenship, but the border would remain wide open.
That’s what experience teaches us, and the lesson of history is reinforced by specific shortcomings of Tillis-Sinema.
In touting this legislation, George Will reminds us of Ronald Reagan’s farewell address, in which Reagan spoke of America as “a tall, proud city” with “doors open to anyone with the will and the heart to get there.” But Reagan committed a rare and massive blunder when he backed an immigration deal similar in form and spirit to Tillis-Sinema — amnesty for illegal immigrants in exchange for measures that supposedly would make our borders secure.
The amnesty happened, of course, but the border security never did. Quite the contrary, the amnesty encouraged mass illegal immigration.
The problem is two-fold. First, it’s quite difficult truly to stop illegal immigration. Second, one of our political parties doesn’t really want to stop it. We could allocate all the money in the federal budget to securing the border. If the president isn’t serious about the project — or worse, believes that it's “xenophobic” — we won’t get border security.
Democrats aren’t serious about border security and many of them seem serious about not having it. As the editors of National Review say, “there’s no reason to believe that additional funding and authorities would make any difference to the Biden administration, which is ignoring the law now to allow a historic flow of illegal immigrants into the country.”
The editors also point to the deficiencies in the Tillis-Sinema bill by comparing it to a proposal by House Republicans:
If Congress wanted to get serious about enforcement, it would adopt the new proposal from the House Republicans in the Texas delegation, led by border hawk Chip Roy. The framework advocates the completion of the wall and associated infrastructure at the border, which is fine as far as it goes. More important are its proposals to reinstitute a robust Remain in Mexico policy, fix the legal morass mentioned above, reform our broken, self-defeating asylum system, and revive enforcement in the interior.
Will criticizes insistence on these measures as letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. But Tillis-Sinema makes the gesture the enemy of the completed act. It should die in the lame duck session, and very likely will.
The second example of muddled “why can’t we just get along” thinking can be found in this op-ed by Amanda Ripley which appeared in yesterday’s Washington Post, just below Will’s piece on Tillis-Sinema. Ripley decries “malignant conflicts that leave everyone worse off.” One of them, she says, is the battle over how U.S. history should be taught.
Ripley contends that, contrary to how culture warriors would have it, there’s a huge amount of agreement between Democrats and Republicans on this subject. She cites a survey of 2,500 American adults conducted by a group called More in Common:
Republicans, the study shows, believe that most Democrats reject the United States’ founding documents and their authors, and want kids to feel ashamed and guilty of our history. That is false (as almost any Democrat can tell you).
Democrats, meanwhile, believe that most Republicans want kids to learn an airbrushed version of history that glosses over slavery and racism. That is not true, either (as most Republicans would say).
However:
The survey found that about 9 out of 10 Democrats say all students should learn how the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution advanced freedom and equality — and that George Washington and Abraham Lincoln should be admired for their roles in U.S. history. That’s twice as many as Republicans typically imagine.
Meanwhile, 9 out of 10 Republicans say Americans have a responsibility to learn from our past and fix our mistakes — and that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks should be taught as examples of Americans who fought for equality. That is nearly three times more than Democrats believe.
That’s nice. But what really matters for purposes of the battle over teaching U.S. history isn’t what most rank-and-file Democrats believe about the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution or Washington and Lincoln. What matters is what education bureaucrats, left-liberal school boards (that rank-and-file Democrats elect), and teachers believe — and how their thinking influences the way U.S. history is taught.
Unfortunately, many of those who control the teaching of U.S. history take a dim view of the Declaration, the Constitution, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln. This is certainly true of those who control the way history is taught to many of America’s brightest and most ambitious students — the ones who take AP U.S. History. I chronicled this sad reality here, here, and here, for example.
It’s also true of American history textbooks widely used in public schools — for example, America’s History by James Henretta, Eric Hinderaker, Rebecca Edwards, and Robert O. Self. According to Stanley Kurtz:
Henretta treats America’s founding as a product of class conflict. But for a passing quote from Benjamin Franklin, there is little in this text that describes our republic’s strengths or explains its longevity. Bereft of inspiration, Henretta offers a spare, cold, reductive, and implicitly debunking take on America’s founding moment.
Clearly, then, the dispute over how to teach U.S. history is not “manufactured” by “conflict entrepreneurs,” as Ripley claims. The dispute is real.
It’s also crucial because what young Americans (who weren’t included in the “More in Common” survey) come to believe about their country’s history is crucial. I don’t see how any nation can flourish if its students have it drummed into them that there’s nothing special about the country; that it was founded on class conflict and (even worse) slavery; and that its subsequent history amounts largely to a playing out of its founding sins — racism and class oppression.
But then, do those who control the teaching of U.S. history want our nation to flourish? Given their dim view of America, and the left’s constant apologizing for our country and perennial opposition to measures that will keep it strong, I doubt they do.
Immigration law is perhaps the best example of actions taken in bad faith by majorities in both national parties over the span of nearly 60 years. Enforcement provisions for both the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 and the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 have been half-heartedly enforced by successive administrations from both parties with no significant or effective oversight from either party in successive Congresses; in particular, when each party controlled the legislative and executive branches at the same time. That makes two successive times in which promises were made in bad faith as enacted in law: Not just one Congress or administration but all of them since 1965 have, at best, selectively enforced the provisions as written. The reasons for all this bad faith in the political class are irrelevant. The only relevant fact is the bad faith itself. There is utterly no reason to believe a word from any congress-person concerning current or future immigration law until the provisions of relevant law currently on the books are enforced to the letter. The history of non-enforcement and ineffective oversight over the past 60 years is reason enough to assume that any proposed legislation if passed will be as ignored as past legislation has been ignored while consequences of the failure to enforce the law will be used in future politics as justification for yet more legislation to be passed.
I agree with most everything here, except I think the pathway for the Dreamers should be for permanent legalization, not American citizenship. The claim is that they "have known no other country," but they still came here illegally, and their youth gives them no special claim to citizenship.
I believe there is a cutoff date in the current proposal, in the sense that Dreamers don't qualify if they came after a specified date, but what argument are we to use against the young who came and continue to come after the cut-off date, a cohort that no doubt already numbers in the millions in view of the Biden border flood? They too will have known no other country, so on what moral basis can we exclude them from what we give now? It's a moral claim that, as the lawyers say, has no limiting principle. If we give the Dreamers permanent status rather than citizenship, we're making a prudential decision used to admit many adults, not one based on a moral claim that the young are entitled to automatic citizenship, so there is a limiting principle. Jim Dueholm