Tuesday, September 5, 2017

Non-Partisan DACA Reality

DACA was enacted with the full knowledge by the President at the time of its borderline legality. He chose to proceed, I assume, because it was better than the alternative of not acting to support those who fell under the provisions: children brought here as minors. With Congress locked into its ridiculous "oppose everything the president does, have no real plan of your own", the sort of immigration reform that we all know needs to happen through actual legislation was an obvious non-starter.

So, along comes a new president who campaigned on undoing everything Obama did, and who proceeds to live up to his promise, sets some dumb time-frame within which Congress is now supposed to come up with a solution...  Yes, its tragic.

But what can we all agree on?  How about this: we enact an immigration policy that allows enough hungry, wanna-be Americans in so we can continue to employ people do keep our country going, we provide an environment of welcome to those people so they want to integrate as productive citizens/residents who wish to contribute to and benefit from what our country has to offer, who don't feel outcast and ripen for radicalization, but rather have a real hope of climbing whatever they see as the ladder of success to achieve some idea of their American dream.

I don't think anyone wants to eliminate the boarders, so find a way to police that humanely, but make the pathway to becoming an American citizen/legal resident straight-forward and viable so it makes sense. That's a tough thing to do, but with thoughtful, minimally racist (inasmuch as that's possible) people working hard, listening to the arguments all around the dial, and coming up with a solution that accomplishes our immigration goals, it's not impossible. It will never be perfect -- that's not the universe we live in -- but it can be good, and we can work to improve it as we watch the results of our initial efforts closely.

Our brainless political hatred (liberal versus conservative) in this country is making this a horrendous non-starter, so we've got to be busting that shit up. It's going to take a willingness to admit where we've been wrong and where the opposition has been right, although the right is going to have to move a little further than the left to the left than the left will to the right. You know it, but the left has started to adopt the unquestioned hatred for everything the opposition does regardless of merits (though admittedly, there's not much happening on the right these days that doesn't deserve heavy derision, but where it exists, the left needs to give credit where it's due, even if there are some disagreements about the details).

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