Reason Magazine - Staff

• Why the Right Shifted on Immigration
  As a rule, the Republicans campaigning for president sound more like they are running for sheriff of Yuma County. In this race, the acceptable lines on illegal immigration are hard, harder and hardest. It's rare to hear someone call for policies that include "love and compassion," as John McCain did in Sunday's Univision debate.
  
  Compassion for illegal immigrants? Is he kidding?
  
  In reality, McCain is truer to GOP tradition than Mike Huckabee, who says, "I will take our country back for those who belong here," or Rudy Giuliani, who says foreigners should have to carry cards with biometric identifiers, or Mitt Romney, who insists Huckabee and Giuliani are not nearly tough enough. For evidence that the party has undergone a major change, look no further than the party's greatest hero, Ronald Reagan.
  
  Reagan didn't so much accept immigrants as smother them with kisses. When he announced his presidential candidacy in 1979, he called for closer ties with Mexico and Canada: "It is time we stopped thinking of our nearest neighbors as foreigners." As president, he said providence had deliberately placed the United States "between the two great oceans, to be found by a special kind of people from every corner of the world."
  
  In 1977, Reagan expressed doubt about the "illegal alien fuss" and suggested that such foreigners were "doing work our own people won't do." In 1986, he signed the immigration reform bill that conservatives now revile as "amnesty."
  
  Clearly the party has undergone a transformation since his day. The question is why. It's not just that we have an estimated 12 million foreigners here illegally—the 1984 GOP platform estimated there were 12 million then. Their economic impact hasn't changed: They still mostly take unpleasant, low-wage jobs. The gripe that they don't speak English and don't assimilate has been around a long time.
  
  But a quarter century ago, the issue was seen through a different lens. What really changed the party faithful's attitude toward illegal immigrants was something seemingly unrelated: the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War.
  
  Back then, we were in an ideological as well as a military competition with communism. And for any argument offered by the other side, we always had a decisive rejoinder: Why is it that in communist countries, people risk their lives to leave, and in free nations, people risk their lives to come?
  
  There were plenty of examples—Chinese fleeing to Taiwan in 1949, East Germans dodging bullets to get to West Berlin, Cubans and Vietnamese taking to the ocean in rickety boats in search of refuge. What they all affirmed was the superiority of our system. We stood as a beacon of liberty, and millions of oppressed people were drawn to our light.
  
  In that context, Mexicans and other immigrants, legal or not, further confirmed the superiority of democracy, individual liberty and free markets. Even if we had some reservations about their arrival, we took it as a compliment that they were willing to go to such lengths to reach our soil.
  
  But in 1989, the Berlin Wall came down, and in due course, both the Soviet empire and the Soviet Union expired. Those events soon altered the general perception of foreign newcomers. Instead of an endorsement of our way of life, illegal immigrants (and even legal ones) were increasingly seen as a threat to it.
  
  In the 1980s, Republicans rarely made a big deal out of the issue. But in 1992, one Republican did—Pat Buchanan, in his effort to unseat incumbent President George Bush. Two years later, the Republican governor of California, Pete Wilson, successfully pushed a ballot initiative to deny public benefits to illegal immigrants.
  
  By 1996, the GOP's national platform declared, "Illegal immigration has reached crisis proportions ... (and) burdens taxpayers, strains public services, takes jobs, and increases crime." In 2000, George W. Bush sounded more moderate. But today, it's clear the party's center of gravity on the issue has shifted, probably for good. Without the backdrop of the Cold War, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free no longer have the same romantic appeal.
  
  A quarter century ago, we saw that many foreigners were willing to do almost anything to join a free and prosperous society where they could make a better life for their children, and Republicans took pride in saying: We want you on our side. Today, they have a different message: So what?
  
  COPYRIGHT 2007 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
  
• Flunking a Religious Test
  Mitt Romney is worried about religious intolerance. He fears religious and nonreligious people will unite to punish him because of his Mormon faith. He thinks it would be much more in keeping with America's noblest traditions if Mormons and other believers joined together to punish people of no faith.
  
  On Thursday, Romney showed up at the George H.W. Bush Library in College Station, Texas, to announce that even if it costs him the White House, his Mormonism is non-negotiable. That came as a relief to those who suspected he would defuse the issue by undergoing a Methodist baptism.
  
  Like John F. Kennedy, who said in 1960 that the presidency should not be "tarnished by arbitrarily withholding its occupancy from the members of any one religious group," Romney said there should be no religious test for this office. "A person should not be elected because of his faith nor should he be rejected because of his faith," he said.
  
  Rejected because of his faith, no. But rejected for his lack of faith? That's another question. Romney evinces a powerful aversion to skeptics. "We need to have a person of faith lead the country," he said in February, which sounds like a religious test to me.
  
  In case anyone doubts his inhospitable stance toward freethinkers, scoffers and Sunday-morning layabeds, his speech confirmed it. Nowhere did he make the slightest effort to suggest that anyone unsure of the existence of God has anything to contribute to our democratic dialogue. In fact, he went out of his way to denounce decadent European societies "too busy or too 'enlightened' to . . . kneel in prayer."
  
  When he said "we do not insist on a single strain of religion—rather, we welcome our nation's symphony of faith," he drew a line that excludes those professing no creed. Zoroastrians and Taoists in, agnostics out.
  
  As he sees it, any American who doesn't worship at least one god is eating away at our democratic structure like a hungry termite. He quoted John Adams: "Our constitution was made for a moral and religious people." Romney went further: "Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. . . . Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone."
  
  He ignores evidence that the framers thought otherwise. The Constitution they so painstakingly drafted contains not a single mention of the Almighty -- unlike the Articles of Confederation, which it replaced. A 1796 treaty, signed by that very same John Adams and ratified by the Senate, stipulated that the U.S. government "is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."
  
  If the founders thought religion was indispensable to a free republic, why does the national charter say "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office"? Wouldn't it have made more sense to include a religious test?
  
  Romney's theory that faith is essential to liberty suggests he has yet to visit the modern world. He doesn't try to explain countries like Germany, France and Norway—free democracies where most people no longer believe in God. Religion is not exactly synonymous with personal freedom in, say, the Muslim world. Organized Christianity once coexisted comfortably with, and often sponsored,
  oppression in Europe and elsewhere.
  
  The former Massachusetts governor makes equally imaginative claims about those who champion church-state separation. He believes they "are intent on establishing a new religion in America—the religion of secularism." Oh? You would look long and hard to find any secularist or civil libertarian who thinks the government should officially espouse atheism or encourage Americans to abandon religion.
  
  Believers insist on keeping "In God We Trust" on our currency. Where are the nonbelievers who want to replace it with "There Is No God"? Secularists don't expect the government to take their side—only to practice neutrality. They think 1) all Americans should be free to practice the religion they choose and 2) none should have the active assistance of the government.
  
  But neutrality between belief and nonbelief is something Romney can't abide. He thinks the government must be firmly and vocally on the side of religion. Only when it comes to Mormonism versus other religions does he recognize the value of neutrality as a principle. Isn't that convenient?
  
  In the end, though, Romney accomplished what he set out to do in this speech. Henceforth, no one can possibly justify voting against him because he's a Mormon. Not when he's provided so many other good reasons.
  
  COPYRIGHT 2007 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
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