God help me. I’m beginning to sound like Joe Biden. I hope there is a cure. If not, the next thing you know, I’ll be confusing Herbert Hoover with Franklin Roosevelt, insulting Indian-Americans who don’t work at 7-11, calling Barack Obama “clean” and “articulate,” and vowing he’ll will never take away my gun. For now, I’ll have to accept the fact that my views on Mexico are similar to those espoused by the Democratic vice presidential candidate.
A few weeks ago, while addressing about 20 Latin American professionals in San Diego on the subject of immigration and the 2008 election, I blurted out that Mexico was “broken.” It’s not just that a country of 110 million people and a functioning if imperfect democracy with abundant resources can’t provide enough jobs for its own people so they don’t have to take their chances north of the border; or that the Mexican government is filled with corruption and has long pampered the rich at the expense of the poor; or that the country has no economic policy to speak of beyond oil revenue and remittances from expatriates in the United States.
The real indictment of Mexico, I told the audience, is that it has become so dependent on money received from abroad —some $25 billion last year alone— that it would consider an act of war any effort to repatriate the millions of Mexican illegal immigrants living in the United States. Well-to-do Mexican professionals south of the border tell me that the thing they fear most is that the United States will ship back large numbers of illegal immigrants that the Mexican economy can’t absorb.
“When you treat your own people as the equivalent of a heat-seeking missile that can wreak unspeakable destruction on society,” I said, “your country is broken.”
Now I see where Joe Biden reached much the same conclusion in December 2007 when he reassured an Iowa crowd concerned with illegal immigration that the solution to the problem starts with Mexico and the Mexican government.
“They’re being irresponsible,” Biden said. “This is the second-wealthiest nation in the hemisphere — we’re not talking about Sierra Leone. This is a dysfunctional society.”
I say broken. He says dysfunctional. Same difference.
Biden’s comments recently resurfaced thanks to another hard-hitting and controversial Spanish-language ad from the McCain-Palin campaign. Last month, the campaign went bilingual to go after Obama by accusing him of helping to kill immigration reform. This month, the target is Biden and his remarks in Iowa blaming our nation’s immigration problem on the fact that Mexico is a “dysfunctional society.”
The assumption is that Mexicans and Mexican-Americans won’t take kindly to this bashing of their ancestral homeland, especially by a public servant with a thin record of fighting for Latino causes.
Actually, now that I think about it, I realize that there is a big difference between what I said and what Biden said. I was criticizing Mexico for letting down its own people; Biden was using Mexico to let people in this country off the hook.
That’s what makes his comments outrageous, even cowardly. Not only was Biden going after cheap applause lines by blaming Mexico. But he was doing his best to obscure the truth. Everyone knows what’s the No. 1 contributor to illegal immigration: employers. What? Biden couldn’t find industries or individuals anywhere in Iowa who are employing illegal immigrants? If that were true, there wouldn’t be illegal immigrants for the people of Iowa to complain about.
Congress didn’t just fail to pass immigration reform and fix a system that everyone agrees desperately needs repair. It missed its chance to tell Americans the unpopular and uncomfortable truth — that they helped bring the problem of illegal immigration upon themselves and they can help solve it. Not by shifting blame, but by accepting it.
That’s what Joe Biden should have told that audience in Iowa and why it’s fair that his comments to the contrary be used against him in the court of public opinion.
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