Too much of a good thing

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06/04/06
Derek Dunn-Rankin column

Too much of a good thing

Good morning.

Mark Foley stopped by our office Friday. It was an active day for the congressman, beginning with the dedication of the U.S. Cleveland Post Office in Punta Gorda.

He was scheduled for a Rotary lunch and a tour of the Charlotte County projects most in need of some federal dollars. Help dealing with plans like widening Burnt Store Road, an ever-tightening bottleneck, would be a nice return of some of our federal tax dollars.

The congressman lives a million love bugs from here, clear across the state, on the eastern side of his district. Now in his 11th year in Congress, he picked up most of Charlotte County in the redistricting that followed the 2000 census. His district now goes from the east to west coast. Starting on the Atlantic side in Palm Beach and St. Lucie counties, it sweeps across Lake Okeechobee and the interior agricultural counties on the way to the Gulf. When the oddly structured district was created, we were concerned that Charlotte would not have visible, active representation.

Foley promised that we need not worry, and he has been true to his word.

In his brief visit, we talked about being pictured with the president, term limits, the very different Senate and House bills on immigration and the difficulty of finding a fair and rational solution.

Foley says the Senate bill is full of serious procedural weaknesses. Far different from the House bill, it is going to make a compromise hard to achieve in the weeks before the fall elections. In constituent feedback, he finds almost no support for the more permissive Senate approach to quickly legitimize the status of millions of illegal immigrants. He acknowledges that while the emotion is there to guard the borders and deal less gently with border jumpers, it is not practical or even possible to contemplate returning millions of illegal workers back to Mexico or other countries.

"Just round up the 12 million illegals and send them back to Mexico," commented one voter reacting to the national debate. It is a representative opinion of many who oppose bilingual schools, amnesty and easy citizenship. The emotion is a replay of a sentiment that has been repeated by many generations. The wave of German-Jewish immigrants in the 50 years before 1900 spawned a strong current of anti-Semitism. When cheap labor was nearly impossible to find for the dirty, dangerous work of building the intercontinental railroads, Chinese were imported at the California end, and Irish work gangs were hired on the Atlantic side of the race across America. This was followed by a "yellow peril," hysteria and a categorization of the Irish as irresponsible alcoholics, and the recruiting ground for street thugs. Poles in Chicago and Russian-Jews and Italians in New York, led the next wave of immigrants taking on dirty, entry-level jobs. In each case, employers looking for cheaper labor provided the attraction. When the new crowd became uncomfortably large, those whose ancestors had been here two or three generations provided the pressure to halt the flood of new arrivals.

I believe we are in that first phase of reaction now. The most likely immediate legislation will focus on slowing or halting the flow from Mexico and South America. Then we will come back to the complicated issue of legitimizing most of those already here. Legislation will incorporate guest-worker permits and employment IDs, putting some responsibility on employers who hire illegals. It will include amnesty under guidelines, a road to citizenship and deportation of those with felony criminal records.