Let's see if we can wrap our minds around the
guest worker program: The very geniuses who gave us Mission Accomplished and WMDs in Iraq; the same crack emergency team that was
baffled and
helpless for days when faced with standing water in New Orleans; the same wonks that wanted to turn our ports over to the United Arab Emirates; the people who allegedly burned an undercover CIA agent working in weapons proliferation in the middle of a war on Islamic terrorists just to send her hubbie a love letter, and may have publicly misled us at official press conferences for two years about it. Yeah,
those same guys have a plan. They're gonna to roll up their sleeves, get to work for the people, they're gonna fix this hugely complex, highly divisive problem, that no other administration or Congress or the smartest people in our country have ever been able to make a dent in for the last century? And, what? We're supposed to just hope they don't:
- Turn several million immigrants into de facto indentured servants to slave away for peanuts benefiting the people who coincidentally fund the GOP jaunts abroad and loan them jets and yachts
- Screw the upper, middle, AND lower classes (Or should I say castes at this point?) in everyway possible. Only the richest sliver of the ultra-elite will escape the consequences
- Manage the whole thing horrendously like every other single item they've gotten within shotgun distance of
- Let even more drugs, crooks, or terrorists, into the country
- Knock the wages of what few, domestic menial jobs haven't been or can't be outsourced to China or India and pay almost enough to live on, into the cellar
- Overload the entire social, safety, and ER net in select communities; schools, medical, social worker, police, firefighters, EMTs, with quasi-legal indigent semi-citizens in dire need of immediate help. Men, women, and children who have no health care, who's rights and status and benefits are, at best, murky
This is one of those irksome things that's unique with this particular cast of political characters in situ: With a competent admin and an independent Congress, even one[s] we might not care for generally, there would still be hope that they're really going to hammer out a half-ass, intermediate-term solution to illegal immigration. It is in everyone's interest for that to happen and, unlike so many other loaded issues, those interests are not split along partisan lines. In a regular administration with a real Congress, everyone would hem and haw, pros and cons, and most would think they got a raw deal, but the problem would be addressed, real progress made, or at least it would be successfully kicked down the road a few years. No one party or branch would be a winner or a loser. It would be kind of exciting to see that kind of bipartisan effort, haggling, and statesmanship. You know, a functional, constitutional, democracy.
But then grim reality comes crashing in, out of far, far right field, like a B-29 on fire, streaking into a smoking crater: given the track record of this White House and this specific rubber-stamp Republican Congress, you really cringe just thinking about these guys running a rib joint, let alone anything more serious.
Whether unlucky or just crappy planners and managers, somehow, everything they touch goes straight to hell--as if fated by some sort of ghoulish trickster deity--and way too often it's accompanied by tremendous suffering, looting, and then the dead bodies start turning up. And as if that trend is not worrisome enough, each new macabre event in the unending incompetence, death, and destruction is followed by the obligatory whining that it was everyone else's fault, except the people who thought it up and did it.
These guys don't need to be taking on any more big jobs. Let's just sail steadily and serenely to the midterms and through to 2008, and hope to hell no hostile entity senses how completely leaderless and spent we are. No more high stakes, gargantuan, costly, neoconservative social experiments of any kind between now and then. There are just too many ways they can screw it up. It could really turn out to be a fitting catastrophic finale. This could affect every man, women, and child one way or another: From Wall Street to Mainstreet to Bushville NOLA, it has every sign of becoming a multi-track train-wreck of staggering proportions, and we're all riding in the lead car.
Update: See Duke1676's immigration primer for more detail on the proposal