WHERE THERE'S SMOKE, THERE'S MIRRORS

Another thing that has taken up a lot of the last month is the huge public uproar about immigration. This raises two sets of questions:

1. What do we do about the millions of undocumented workers in the country, one of whom cleans my office and occasionally my house? and

2. Why is it such a hot issue now? What has happened in the last couple of months to bring it into the public eye?

Let's start with the easy question first. Immigration is a hot issue now for the same reason that gay marriage was a hot issue a couple of years ago and Terry Schiavo was a hot issue a couple of years before that--because the Right needs something to distract voters from real issues, like the increasing unfairness of the tax system, the decline in real wages for almost all working Americans, and the dismal consequences of the war in Iraq (which itself started out as a distraction from the other real issues.) It's a fake issue, in that nobody is seriously proposing to do anything about it that gets in the way of Business As Usual, but a lot of people can be aroused to blind fury by discussing it.

And blind fury is exactly what the Right wants us to experience. The Left, unfortunately, has allowed itself to be baited into blind fury about immigration, just as it did about gay marriage. I'm all for gay marriage (though, as a lawyer doing a lot of family law, including various procedures to make unofficial gay and lesbian families look like official straight marriage, I should oppose it, since it would probably reduce my client load.) I'll go into my position(s) on immigration further on, but, although I always enjoy a good demonstration, I think the immigration marches may have generated the same kind of backlash as the media blitz over gay marriage, and the Right probably counted on that in both instances.

All of this stuff is part of the Culture Wars. The essence of the Culture Wars in this country is that:
1. My dream is someone else's nightmare,
2. And vice versa.
3. All the fulminating and marching in the world will not change the culture overnight. Culture changes at its own pace, the slow, hidden pace of individual decisions and individual awareness of other people's individual decisions.
4. Culture consists of two crucial components: what people do, and what they believe people ought to do,
5. Which are rarely the same.

So the fulminating and marching can't change the culture, and aren't intended to--at most, they express what different groups of people believe people ought to do. But while we're fulminating and marching, the Right can carry on its grim agenda of impoverishing American workers and then punishing them for being poor, without anybody on either side noticing, including those most seriously affected.

So next time you see a hot issue surface out of nowhere, ask yourself: why today? why this issue? and, most important of all, what's the other hand doing? And try not to get distracted.