Plan Too Heartless For Country To Back Anti-Initiative Fear At Root Of Unconscionable Proposal.

Life is too short to spend it fearing, stereotyping and regulating people we don’t know or understand. It is far more effective - but more difficult - to learn how to enable others to achieve their goals, which usually turn out to be identical to our own.

Consider illegal aliens, for example. What a damning term. What a tempting scapegoat. Pending in Washington state is an initiative, similar to one approved in California last year, to make illegal immigrants ineligible for tax-supported health, education and welfare services.

This proposal is rooted in the poisonous politics of resentment. In Washington, there is no reasonable basis for the advocates’ claim that illegals are stealing “our” jobs and entitlements. Spread across this state of 5.4 million people are an estimated 30,000 undocumented immigrants. That’s no threat.

Certainly it is not a threat large enough to require school teachers and state workers to report persons who appear (translation: darker skin, foreign accent) to be illegals. The consequences this requirement would have for legal immigrants, and for those ordered to play the repugnant role of race police, make Initiative 653 unconscionable.

Besides, we don’t provide schools, emergency health care and welfare because recipients are taxpaying citizens. We provide those things because we have been a compassionate, constructive country. Do we really want to become a nation of tightwads who check race, accent and I.D. before rendering humanitarian aid to children? Do we need to? Absolutely not.

Why do immigrants come here? Most come here to work. They take the jobs that America’s angry white males won’t: Picking fruit, pulling weeds, hauling construction rubble, mopping floors. Many take the income back across the border, supplementing the wretched living standards in their home towns.

If we Americans want to address immigration problems, we should do so directly. We can work for better economic conditions on the other side of our borders. We can punish employers who hire illegals. We could build elaborate fences and hire more guards. We could abandon the obviously ineffective laws that brand some people “illegal,” and open our borders.

We ought to face those options, and choose as wisely as we can. But we cannot afford to let resentment and fear kill our nation’s character.

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