Another Mighty Conundrum

The sanctuary city movement, and all its baggage, terminates in one troublesome idea: that the USA should have open borders and that anyone from a foreign land who manages to get here by whatever means is home-free-all. The most recent Democratic nominee for president said just the other day that she dreamed of open borders. The much-abused word dream has been at the center of our discourse about immigration, a purposefully sentimental manipulation of language for a culture struggling to ascertain the boundaries of reality in an era of universal wishful thinking.

Anyone who listens to National Public Radio, for instance, may notice the care they take to keep the boundary as fuzzy as possible vis-à-vis the status of people here from other lands. “Undocumented” has been the favorite trope, a dodge that implies that the people in question are victims of a clerical error — someone over in the Document Division forgot to hand them the right paperwork. Or else they are all simply labeled “immigrants,” leaving out the question of whether they are in the country legally or not. Do not suppose it is mere sloppiness.

Lately, there is the matter of census-takers asking the people they interview — theoretically everybody who resides in the US — whether they are citizens or not. It would seem to be within the legitimate interests of demographic statisticians to ask that question, but it has ignited a firestorm of opposition. All manner of casuistry has been applied by that opposition to rationalize why we wouldn’t want to know whether people here are citizens or not. It all seems to come down to a cynical political calculation that the voter rolls can be eventually padded in favor of the Democratic Party (of which I remain an unhappy registered member, in order to vote in the New York state primary election).

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