…and how I stopped being a tool.
In a last minute move after seeing a huge media and blog outcry Arizona has altered the vague sections of their Immigrant law that were crafted by a hate group lawyer, and now it’s more reasonable. Indeed, it’s something similar to what I suggested in 2006.
Lawmakers on Thursday night changed the language to require scrutiny only of people who police stop, detain or arrest. They also changed a section of the bill that barred officers from “solely” using race as grounds for suspecting someone is in the country illegally; opponents had argued that that would allow race to be a factor. The legislators removed the word “solely” to bar race from being used by officers enforcing the law.
Note that since that 2006 post and others like it, I’ve moved more to the center on immigration. I’ve seen it become the wedge that split the Republicans apart as I predicted, and I saw moderates leave and extremist groups like the Birchers swarm in to fill that vacuum. Here’s something else I wrote along that path – the more I researched the less I could support the Xenophobic fears driving the debate.
If treatment of the illegals is too harsh this will backfire as well. Many who feel firm now will quail before the hordes of MSM and liberal deportation horror stories to come. For make no mistake, in many cases enforcing this will drive a wedge into one of conservativism’s key values: Family Unity. Some families will be torn apart. The father or mother will be deported — so whatever the outcome of the conference committee two major conservative values will clash. With that said I refer you back to the quote at the start, and remind you that in the end all problems are solvable if one factor is patience, and the other persistence.
It was after this — when I saw large segments of the party really turn on Bush, McCain, Graham and others that I realized this this was the issue that would split us. I saw partisans full of bile attacking Republicans harder than any Demagogue from the Democrats would and began to research. My queasiness about recognizing the need for immigration just due to the sheer demographics of the aging baby boomers (who is going to care for and nurse all of the gray hairs in a few short years? ) turned to outright alarm when I saw that many of the cheerleaders, like Michelle Malkin, were aligned with Peter Brimelow and the Pat Buchanan tea cup racist crowd at the odious VDARE site. I began to realize that “Culture” and “Identity” weren’t just code words for the Eurofascists, they were code words for the racists here as well.
Do you suspect some of the legislators in Arizona started looking into things like Kris Kobach’s background and actually realized what tools they had been, like I did? I can only hope so.
