In my last blog posting, Immigration trapped in the vortex of politics in the House (Thursday June 6, 2013), I railed against what seemed to be the Republican party’s intransigence on immigration reform. The Republican Party postured itself as the party of principle rather than one that can lead our nation when it focused on the issue of healthcare coverage for provisional immigrants under the Senate’s Immigration Reform Bill (S.744) to be a non-starter.
I was pleased today when I read that “Five current and formers leaders of the New Hampshire Republican Party penned an Op-ed in the New Hampshire Union Leader declaring their support for the “Gang of Eight” bill and making the case for why all Republicans should support it.” http://www.aila.org/content/default.aspx?docid=18308. The article entitled, Steve Duprey, John Stabile, Wayne Semprini, Fergus Cullen and Wayne MacDonald: Why Republicans should support immigration reform states in commonsense language that:
We’ve heard some say that immigrants take jobs away from Americans. We suppose one could argue that David Ortiz, who is from the Dominican Republic, does take a job away from an American who would gladly DH for the Red Sox. When professional sports teams search the world for the best players, get them visas, and put their skills to work in America, we consider that the free market at work. The same principle should apply for the world’s best engineers, scientists and entrepreneurs.
Does that not ring of commonsense? It gives me hope that the Republican Party will fulfill its public duty and not allow the shrills of minority fringe voices to block a solution to the crisis that grips our immigration system. It would appear the “commonsense” harkens back to the intellectual origins of the American Revolution where Thomas Paine proclaimed:
SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.
Common Sense, Thomas Paine (1776).
Is the Republican Party simply an agitator that will use the “wickedness” of government to stop what a free “society” has mandated that it wants from Washington on immigration reform?
There is hope for the Republican Party in the example set by the New Hampshire delegation. Perhaps the logic of its commonsense can reach the rest of the House Republicans to move forward into the 21st Century with a commonsense immigration solution.
