November 14, 2007
HAVING IT BOTH WAYS
The Mugwumps* Who Stand in the Way of Solving the Immigration Problem
Hillary Clinton’s ambiguous answer to a question about giving driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants—she said in an MSNBC-sponsored debate that it “makes a lot of sense,” but that that didn’t mean she actually favored it—has become prosecution exhibit A for Clinton’s almost instinctive tendency to avoid committing herself to clear positions on controversial subjects.
It’s a bum rap—or at least selective prosecution.
Clinton, like many other candidates, and like most other serious candidates, does tend to adopt positions that match as closely as possible the views of large segments of the electorate. Some call it opportunism. Others call it democracy: doing what the voters want.
Clinton is an easy target for such charges from her opponents and the media because, contrary to her image as a consummate politician, the architecture of her triangulation is so exposed. The license idea, for instance, “makes a lot of sense,” she said, but “I did not say that it should be done.”
When it comes to immigration, however, politicians who are trying to do what the voters want have little choice but to come down on both sides of the issue. Because that’s where the national consensus is.
We want our immigration laws enforced. We want those who have violated them punished, or at least sent back across the borders they crossed illegally. We don’t want to pay for educational and social services that illegal immigrants, like the rest of us, often need.
But we also want our fresh fruits and vegetables, our restaurant meals and our home improvements at prices that are incompatible with paying wages high enough to attract citizens or legal immigrants. We recoil at the mass raids, confinements and family disruptions that would be the result of excising twelve million—or one million—people from our work force. We want to believe in our country as the “Mother of Exiles,” as Emma Lazarus dubbed the Statue of Liberty.
Like Hillary Clinton, in other words, we want it both ways.
