Immigration

This is the premier episode of The Sidebar, the weekly podcast from the New America Foundation that looks at what's in and what's underlying the news. This week, host Pamela Chan talks with Tamar Jacoby, Katherine Zoepf and Dan Meredith about Syria, privacy and immigration.

Among Republican presidential candidates, it's been demagoguery as usual. Why have a substantive debate when you can exchange inflammatory sound bites instead, especially on immigration?

But something surprising happened last week far from the campaign trail — on Capitol Hill, of all places. Just when we thought Congress would never act to address the nation's broken immigration system, members of the House made a critical breakthrough, voting overwhelmingly to approve a fix that will make American companies more competitive and the immigration system fairer and more welcoming.

It's not a good sign when even the most obvious truths cannot be spoken on the campaign trail.

Deport 11 million illegal immigrants? Can Newt Gingrich really be the only Republican presidential candidate who understands that this would be impossible?

Not only would it cost tens of billions of dollars and divert resources from many far more pressing law enforcement priorities, but even the toughest of presidents would soon back off as the media images of mass round-ups beamed around the world—that really is not the kind of country most Americans want to be or live in.

Change is never pretty. And the change that results when 50 states step in to take on a job Washington has tried and failed to do can be especially messy. This is what's happening -- with a vengeance -- on immigration. In the past five years, there has been a virtual revolution in immigration lawmaking. And the result is not just chaos -- it's a lot of bad policy.

When Rene Gonzalez, one of five Cuban agents reviled by Miami hardliners and celebrated by the Havana government and its supporters, walks out of a Miami prison today after serving 13 years of a 15 year sentence, where will he go and who will be there to greet him? This is a question someone in the Obama administration surely must have considered, because how they answer could cost them – and the Miami Dade Police Department – dearly.

The fact that this question is being asked speaks volumes about Washington's self-destructive mindset, and says very little about California. The state is merely acting in its own economic interest. California is required to support the K-12 educations of all students, even undocumented ones. So why waste that investment by making it impossible for them to attend college?

In the spring of 2010, Michelle Obama visited an elementary school in Silver Spring, Maryland. Sitting cross-legged on the floor of the gym, with news cameras rolling, she called on an apprehensive second grader who had raised her hand. Why, asked the girl, was the president “taking everyone away” who doesn’t have papers to live in the United States? “My mom doesn’t have any papers,” she told the first lady.

There have been a few, gratifying moments during my long career as a writer when people have told me their lives were changed for the better by something I wrote. Yet every writer, particularly those dealing with controversial subjects, has to confront the possibility that his or her words will have, or will seem to have had, baleful influences as well.

What's wrong with this picture: Even as the world is becoming increasingly interconnected and interdependent, we seem to be approaching conflicts more in zero-sum terms and with all-or-nothing politics.

Because digital networks and the global economy have humans more tightly bound than any time in their history, our well-being is inextricably intertwined with that of strangers from around the globe.

How would the American right have responded had Anders Behring Breivik been a Muslim? Luckily, we don't have to guess. In the immediate aftermath of Friday's terrorist attack in Norway, conservative Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin did us the favor of simply assuming that he was a Muslim. She then used the attack to denounce lawmakers who in the name of deficit reduction favor "huge cuts in defense" and to lambast President Obama for suggesting "that we can wrap up things in Afghanistan."