Is there a glimmer of light at the Southern Border?

I have over many years come to despise Tom Friedman, who is the NYTimes lead op-ed columnist, unfailing fountain of pious liberal conventional wisdom, and pompous windbag. Early in his career, he was a reporter on the foreign desk, and as such spent several years in the Middle East. He wrote a book about the experience "From Beirut to Jerusalem", which I thought at the time was pretty good. After he took up residence in the Washington office he started writing bilge like "The World Is Flat". I stopped reading his stuff and I have been calmer, if not happier, since then.


Usually when his columns are linked on the websites that I attend to, it is to ridicule them. Typically with good reason as they are pious liberal conventional wisdom, expressed by a pompous windbag. I was prepared for the usual when I followed a link to: "Trump Is Wasting Our Immigration Crisis: The system needs to be fixed, but “the wall” is only part of the solution." by Thomas L. Friedman on April 23, 2019.

But, when I read this:

SAN DIEGO — On April 12, I toured the busiest border crossing between America and Mexico — the San Ysidro Port of Entry, in San Diego — and the walls being built around it. Guided by a U.S. Border Patrol team, I also traveled along the border right down to where the newest 18-foot-high slatted steel barrier ends and the wide-open hills and craggy valleys beckoning drug smugglers, asylum seekers and illegal immigrants begin.

* * *

The whole day left me more certain than ever that we have a real immigration crisis and that the solution is a high wall with a big gate — but a smart gate.

I said to myself, wow, isn't that almost exactly what Trump has been saying for the last six months? Who let Tom of off the ranch? Last time the subject of a wall came up Nancy Pelosi declared it to be immoral. so, I read on. Tom said that:

Without a high wall, too many Americans will lack confidence that we can control our borders, and they therefore will oppose the steady immigration we need. But for this wall to have a big gate, it has to be a smart and compassionate one, one that says, “Besides legitimate asylum seekers, we’ll accept immigrants at a rate at which they can be properly absorbed into our society and work force, and we’ll favor visa seekers with energies and talents that enrich and advance our society.” That’s the opposite of the unstrategic, far-too random, chaotic immigration “system” we have now.

That’s been a “system” in which millions of people could cross into our country illegally or overstay their visas. Or cross over and claim asylum and then melt into society while awaiting their hearings. Or bring in their family members through family reunification programs. And that’s no matter their possible impact on communities and social welfare resources or their ability to assimilate and contribute to society.

* * *

And in an era when more and more countries will fracture under environmental, population, criminal and technological stresses, we simply cannot take everyone who shows up at our border.

End chain migration. Accept legal immigrants on a rational basis. Revise the asylum system to only admit genuine cases of persecution. Limit the number of legal immigrants to the rate at which they can be absorbed. These are all propositions that Trump and most Republicans can accept.

Of course, Tom is writing for the NYTimes and he must sound the "Orange Man Bad" gong:

Instead, we’re stuck with a man who just exploits the border crisis and uses his “wall” to divide the nation and energize his base.

Or, as Frum put it: “The gratuitous brutalities of the Trump administration shock the conscience, and fail even on their own terms. Intended as deterrents, they are not deterring. They are succeeding only in counter-radicalizing liberal opinion to stigmatize almost all immigration enforcement against nonfelons as cruel, racist and unacceptable.”

I am not a huge Trump fan, but guys like Tom and Frum have spent the last few years criticizing Trump's rhetoric, not on the basis of what Trump said, but of what his Democrat and Media opponents have said that he said. Or, even worse, on the basis of what some drunk in the last row said. Further, Trump's rhetoric is off the cuff, and full of bombast and rodomontade, often humorous, and simply will not bear careful parsing.

But, Tom's exit is graceful:

In sum: we need new walls; we need a serious strategy for mitigating climate change and offering economic and governance assistance to countries to our south that are being destabilized by poverty and extreme weather; we need to rethink who is entitled to asylum, so people fleeing economic dislocation don’t overwhelm our borders and harden our hearts to people truly fleeing tyranny; we need to encourage legal immigration of people who can help our country thrive in the 21st century; and we need to partner with Mexico on a Mexican-American plan to manage the flow of migrants through Mexico to our border. 

None of these alone will work. Anyone who tells you otherwise has not been to the border.

If there were any Democrats in Congress who could bear the slings and arrows of their outraged base, Tom's column could provide the basis for legislation that would go a long way to resolving the crisis on the border. I think that they would be surprised to find that Republicans would work with them.