The President Is A Grown-Up

President Bush has shown an admirable (and unfortunately self-defeating) ability to do the right thing regardless of polls. The War on Terror is the prime example, of course, since we are now told ad nauseum that majorities of Americans have concluded that Iraq is a disaster. He doesn't care. He knows that majorities of Americans have also apparently concluded that playing No-Limit Hold-'em online while listening to rap is the height of entertainment. Grown-ups know better. Grown-ups know, for instance, that the appropriate measure of success in Iraq is not whether Fallujah can, with a wave of a wand, be turned into Shaker Heights, Ohio. That is, the appropriate measure of success for grown-ups in the real world is not Nirvana but whether the decisions we make lead to a world that is better than the world would have been otherwise. And, sometimes, the measure is whether the particular part of the world we are concerned with is only a bad place, and not a horrific place. Iraq today is not a very nice place... it's not your suburban soccer mom's Iraq. But it's not a horrific slaughterhouse, as it was under Saddam Hussein, and would have been but for our intervention.

The President is showing the same kind of courage in discussing illegal immigration. His own party appears to be in the grip of their own utopian fantasy... the fantasy that we can somehow wave a wand and deport 11-12 million illegal immigrants. We can't. The logistics just don't make sense. 11-12 million people clogging jails, 11-12 million people clogging federal courts. Imagine that we could wave a wand and arrest and hold and give due process to the 11-12 million illegal immigrants. You're talking about 250,000 busloads of 50 people to take them to Mexico.

"Massive deportation of the people here is unrealistic - it's just not going to work," Bush said today. "You know, you can hear people out there hollering it's going to work. It's not going to work."

He's right. We've got to figure out a way to solve the illegal immigration problem without deportation. But the solution is not going to be one that will cause Nirvana to commence. Instead, it's going to be a solution that is less bad than the alternatives.

My view: (1) close the borders as best we can; (2) increase legal immigration, especially for educated professionals and people with technical expertise; (3) give illegals an opportunity to become legal through some kind of process that would include (4) a requirement that each and every new American citizen learn English as soon as reasonably possible.