February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Immigrants do indeed build, and in many ways. But these are hard times for the builders. America’s willingness and, yes, its ability to absorb legal arrivals in the numbers of yore has diminished markedly in the past few decades.
By contrast, our nation’s ability to absorb millions of illegal and undocumented workers seems undiminished.
This is a contradiction and one that must be addressed sooner rather than later by a Congress inhabited, as is usually the case, by the sensible, the uncertain and the slightly unhinged.
There’s no doubt that whatever comes down the pike in terms of immigration reform some people are going to have to quit on their American dream.
What we face now is a question of degrees, of numbers, of proportions.
If some in Washington had their way the result of the upcoming debate would be an absolute, and millions would be expelled.
But the task for legislators is more complex than mass expulsion. America’s future will depend greatly on the ability of Congress to weave a workable compromise between the necessity for greater border security and the country’s need for the labor of those men and women who are striving for a better life, even from within the shadows of their illegality.
This week we are reminded of the potential price of unwise exclusion. Patrick O’Keeffe was once an undocumented Irish immigrant. But he survived and stayed America’s course. Now he is the winner of America’s richest literary award.
We should be careful about who we show the once golden door to.
That expelled immigrant might have been the parent of the first-generation American who finally solved the riddle of Lou Gehrig’s disease; that other undocumented man or woman might have been a parent of the first American to set foot on Mars.