Schizoid America posts two signs on the Mexican border: Help Wanted and Go Home.
On the one hand, we want cheap, hardworking laborers to harvest our crops and construct our roads and process our beef, pork and chickens. On the other hand, we don't want inferior, dangerous foreigners corrupting our superior culture, so deportation is the order of the day.
We had the same love/hate relationship with African slaves in this country. We desperately wanted their free labor to grow tobacco and cotton, but once black slaves were freed, we had a dilemma on our hands. Inferior blacks were too beastly and dangerous, too inferior to be safely integrated into white society, so America began to send them back to Africa. Even President Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, agreed with the deportation plan. Strangely, Lincoln never volunteered to go back to Europe.
Enter political scientist, Peter Beinart, with his analysis "The Democrats Immigration Mistake."
Beinart quotes Paul Krugman: "immigration is an intensely painful topic . . . because it places basic principles in conflict."
How do we balance unity/assimilation with diversity/ethnicity? Obama put unity of America first and won twice. Clinton put diversity first and lost.
"Promoting assimilation need not mean expecting immigrants to abandon their culture. But it does mean breaking down the barriers that segregate them from the native-born. And it means celebrating America's diversity less, and its unity more."
Obama: "there is not a liberal America and a conservative America . . . There is not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America."
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