Path to Nowhere

It's been a month since we left the conventions behind, and it's been nothing if not eventful. Bank failures, government bailouts, a plummeting Dow Jones average, a vice-presidential debate generating record tv-turnout--and a vp candidate eliciting either the kind of excitement or the morbid curiosity/horrified fascination usually reserved, respectively, for teen idols on the one hand or celebrities in the midst of very public nervous breakdowns on the other.

And immigration remains the issue that dares not speak its name.

Except in the occasional op-ed or editorial by those determined folks who believe that it's an issue that needs to be addressed. Just saw one on the Times website titled "Ellis Island is Closed" that provides a link to a fantastic graphic explanation of how difficult our "legal" immigration system is, a compelling counterargument to those who ask "What part of illegal don't you understand?"

As the debate is played out in too many towns and on too many airwaves across the nation, the part of illegal that people don't understand is the extent to which the legal immigration system is simply out of step with our nation's needs; the extent to which this disconnect is the reason we have an "illegal" problem; and the extent to which enforcement of the law as it currently stands is an exercise in futility, cruelty, and squandered resources.

But the discussion seldom goes there; it highlights the most visible "problem"--the large undocumented population here--and ascribes it to individual malfeasance on the part of impatient, opportunistic, lawless immigrants, rather than to the root cause--a path to legal status that is so narrow, labyrinthine, and studded with roadblocks along the way that it virtually doesn't exist. Check out the visual depiction of the system from Reason magazine, which brings much-needed clarity to the debate.

When we were on the road, talking to people on the street in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and Iowa and Denver and St. Paul and other points in between, most people told us they had no problems with immigrants, but they did have a problem with those who come illegally. Which is understandable, because if you don't know what the immigration process entails, of course you'd look askance at folks who don't seem to play by the rules. But it would have been great to show them the chart from Reason; it might help focus their concern not so much on those who come or stay without status, but on the phenomenon of illegal immigration as a result of the insufficient framework we have for legal immigration. Maybe then they would see that it's the system that needs fixing, not the people.