on Aug 3rd, 2007Flip-flop Award - John McCain
Republican Senator John McCain has changed his mind about illegal immigrants.
At one time he championed a bill that would have enabled many of the estimated 12 million illegal aliens in the US to achieve citizenship through a guest worker program. The bill failed earlier this year and McCain, whose presidential campaign is also failing, has a new position which is, conveniently, more in line with the GOP’s stand.
McCain has moved away from comprehensive reform and now backs a scaled-down plan to stiffen immigration rules without providing a path to ciitzenship. “We can still show the American people that we are serious about securing our nation’s border,” he said in a statement, calling the new bill “an essential step toward achieving comprehensive reform in the future.”
Some see pure politics here. Steven Camarota, the research director at the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors vigorous immigration enforcement, told the AP, “He recognizes his position on the issue is killing him.”
I can tell McCain this much: the flip-flop might help you within your party but it won’t help you win the nation’s first primary. The excitment in New Hampshire eight years ago, when you were a maverick and thinking for yourself, is long gone. You’re not the same man and this is not the same state; it’s a blue state now. Look again at last November’s Congressional results. Johnny, we hardly knew you.
Related: Flip-flop Award - Mitt Romney
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Royal icing & decorating
This country, just like yours, has depended on immigrants for centuries.
You might call us English, but historically and ethnically we’re just a mish-mash of Celts, half-forgotten Romans, Angles, Saxons, Flemish, Vikings, Normans …
and that just describes a few of the most notable influxes up to 1066.
We English are nothing if not a hybrid race, and so much so, that it’s desperately hard to know who got here first, or even who might have been here before them.
Much more recently, of course, we share ‘our’ (ha!) country and this great city with Scots, Welsh, Irish, Kiwis, Aussies, South Africans, Jamaicans, European bankers, Ugandan Asians, Russian oil magnates, displaced Jews, Zimbabwean refugees, Palestinians, Indians, Pakistanis, Thai, Greek airline owners, half a million Polish plumbers, plus a Premiership of foreign footballers.
And even the occasional Yank, as well (if I can still count Madonna in that category).
We benefit enormously, from all of these people and the different perspectives and rich diversity they bring.
Immigration is such a difficult issue to manage, but ultimately it’s basic economics - immigration has managed itself, unbridled, for centuries, and it likely always will.
We’re all a part of that story, each and every one of us over here in England, and surely, in America, so are all of you.
I must say that I don’t know where it will all end, or what the answers really are. The depth of suspicion and fear felt by the US about Mexico is something I have experienced and written about before. As an occasional visitor to your country, I surely have no right to comment, and it’s quite obvious that there are no simple solutions. Yet looking at the issue from a distance, it so often feels like such a huge missed opportunity.
And whilst I might applaud such marvellous films as ‘Bread and Roses’, ‘Crash’ and ‘Babel’ for their wry observations and searing indictment of the conditions and difficulties facing our immigrant classes, perhaps that description tells its own tale of prejudice.
Because, ultimately, there should be no such thing as an ‘immigrant class’.
After all, going back in time, we all fit inside that category. And now, at least in part, it’s the weight of legislation against immigration that creates that state and forces it to such a shadowy and impoverished existence.
We have to remember that these are simply people, looking for a job and a means to feed their families. Just like all our own forebears did, many years ago.
Nothing’s changed.
I should pay you for the perspective you add here — need some carb-rich cookies (oops, biscuits) for your next marathon?
Seriously, I do agree with your points, which reminded me of quite a strong anti-Pakistani feeling among some in London last time I was there, many years now. I don’t know which group preceded or followed, but in this country there’s always a group or class of people who are scorned or mocked with society’s approval, covert or overt.
I had double-checked McCain’s statement to see whether he’d actually said, “our nation’s borders” since we do, after all, have two of them and I’m not terribly far from the northern one. But no, once again, it is only the southern border and I rather resent the ease with which “border” can become code for “Mexicans.” It might be glib of me to say I wish politicians would say what they mean and mean what they say, but I do wish they would. It’ll never happen, of course, not anywhere.
Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.
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