Anti-Illegal-Immigration, Not Anti-Immigration

If you said the over/under on how much of a New York Times editorial I could was two sentences, then "under" was the smart bet. In something called an "Editorial Observer," Lawrence Downes begins:

Everybody said that the nation’s anti-immigrant fever was going to spread to Texas this year.

I am as much for border security as the next much-maligned conservative, but I (along with many of the rest of them) have nothing against immigrants. Our gripe is with illegal immigrants and those in the United States--whether employers or activist groups--who facilitate their entrance and permanence in the country. Failing to distinguish between legal and illegal immigration is a disservice to the debate about immigration reform.

The editorial goes on to discuss the alliance that has formed between pro-business Republicans and the pro-illegal-immigrant (my word) groups in favor of reforms that Downes describes as "that blend of border toughness and pro-immigrant fairness that Republicans elsewhere deride as 'amnesty.'" Money quote:

The story dates to last year. It has to do, as Megan Headley wrote in The Texas Observer, with pro-business Republicans realizing that anti-immigrant fervor “threatened to purge Texas of the workers that pluck chickens, build houses, and make some people very rich.”

There is nothing so sacred about plucked chickens or new homes or the wealth of those who employ illegal aliens in pursuit of their own riches that should condone the flouting of immigration laws. For more on immigration reform, read here.