From the Left

/

Politics

Hiding Border Troubles from News Cameras Only Makes the Spotlight Brighter

Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

But unlike immigration from Mexico that happens “every single, solitary year,” the current surge is driven largely by violence, instability and corruption in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador at rates that exceed the administration’s ability to house them. Even Biden’s Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said recently that we need to brace ourselves for more arrivals at the border “than we have in the last 20 years.”

Yet, as much as it excites some voters more than others, very little progress has been made in resolving differences between the two parties on immigration since the Immigration Reform and Control Act signed by Ronald Reagan in 1986.

That act granted amnesty to most undocumented immigrants who arrived here prior to 1982. But many more have arrived since then, and the politics around immigration have turned it into a third-rail issue (“touch it and you die”) for politicians in both parties, which opened fertile ground for Trump to make it his signature issue in 2016.

So, after signing his $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package, Biden might find consensus on, say, infrastructure repair or voting rights to be more appealing than immigration reform.

But the immigration issue isn’t going away. Biden avoids the word “crisis,” but he should remember an old saying inaccurately attributed to the Chinese alphabet: “Crisis” contains both “danger” and “opportunity.” Immigration poses political dangers but also opportunities to be more transparent, restore public trust and ultimately build national unity.

 

========

(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)

©2021 Clarence Page. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.


(c) 2021 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

Comics

David M. Hitch Tom Stiglich Dave Whamond John Deering Mike Smith Kirk Walters