One thing no one can deny is that Newt Gingrich has a talent for framing an issue. So when he attempted to cast immigration reform in family friendly terms in last night’s Republican presidential debate, it offered an opportunity for the other candidates to return to their dark side. And to paraphrase “The Sopranos” Silvio Dante, ‘they failed to disappoint.”Here is an exchange between Gingrich, Michele Bachmann, and Mitt Romney as recounted in MSNBC’s First Read:
“If you’ve come here recently, you have no ties to this country, you ought to go home, period,” Gingrich said. “If you’ve been here 25 years and you got three kids and two grandkids, you’ve been paying taxes and obeying the law, you belong to a local church, I don’t think we’re going to separate you from your family, uproot you forcefully and kick you out.”
When Michele Bachmann took issue with that statement — equating it to “amnesty” — Gingrich replied, “I do suggest, if you go back to your district and you find people who have been here 25 years and have two generations of family and have been paying taxes and are in a local church, as somebody who believes strongly in family, you’re going to have a hard time explaining why that particular subset is being broken up and forced to leave, given the fact that they’ve been law-abiding citizens for 25 years.”
And after Mitt Romney said that “amnesty” was a magnet for illegal immigrants, the former House speaker added, “I’m prepared to take the heat for saying let’s be humane in enforcing the law without giving them citizenship, but by finding a way to create legality so that they are not separated from their families.”
Interesting exchange and Speaker Gingrich really caught them all flat-footed. But as Rick Perry, John McCain, and George W. Bush have all found out, drifting toward having “a heart” or “let’s be humane” to undocumented immigrants is not exactly cat nip to the party base.
This may imperil Gingrich’s standing in the all-important Cruelty Primary. This is the ongoing contest in which Republican primary audiences cheer lustily for the death penalty; debaters acquiesce as Rick Santorum implies that Latino = illegal; and the audience again participates as Ron Paul stumbles over the question of whether or not to save the life of a young man who becomes ill without health insurance.
We have a long history of anti-immigration sentiment in our state. As Richard D. Brown and Jack Tager wrote in Massachusetts: A Concise History the Irish were bad enough but when Italians, Germans, eastern European Jews, French Canadians, Slavs, Syrians, Portuguese, and Scandinavians started pouring in during the 1880s and 1890s, well, enough is enough. Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge took up the fight to prevent dilution of America by such “inferior stock.” Lodge’s response was a literacy test to restrict immigration. It took thirty years and the post-World War I political atmosphere for Lodge’s legislation to become law. But it was too late for his beloved commonwealth. Hundreds of thousands of Italian and eastern European immigrants had entered the state, forever sullying its pristine character.
Like a lot of descendants of immigrant stock in this region I was brought up to resent the Cabot Lodges and their allies. Now I can only pity them their incompetence. In the twenty-first century we have become so much more advanced in our manner of oppressing immigrants.