Dreamers Dreaming Dreams

Guest Post by Jim Kunstler

Hurricanes Harvey and Irma are so out of the news now that people not listening to the mold grow in their sweltering bedrooms probably think these events had something to do with the Confederate defeat. Both The New York Times and the WashPo are much more concerned this morning with doings on the planet Saturn, and the career moves of fashion icon Chelsea Manning, which is perhaps how things should be in Attention Deficit Nation. Standing by on developments there….

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In the meantime, personally, I think it would be cruel to deport fully acculturated and Americanized young adults to Mexico and Central America. But there should be no question that it’s up to congress to figure out what to do about the DACA kids, and put it into coherent law. The Golden Golem of Greatness was correct to serve the ball into congress’s court. The suave and charming Mr. Obama only punted the action on that problem, and rather cynically too, I suspect, since he knew the next president would be stuck with it.

It’s hard to overcome the sentimental demagoguery this quandary fetches up. The so-called Dreamers are lately portrayed in the media as a monoculture of spectacularly earnest high-achievers, all potential Harvard grads, and future Silicon Valley millionaires working tirelessly to add value to the US economy. This, again personally, I doubt , and there’s also room to doubt that they are uniformly acculturated and Americanized as claimed by the journalists cherry-picking their stories to support the narrative that national borders and immigration laws are themselves cruel anachronisms that need to be opposed.

That Dem / Prog narrative has been suspiciously hypocritical for years — the insistence on referring to anybody here illegally as “undocumented,” as if their citizenship status was due to a mere clerical error, and also the obvious pandering for votes among the fast-growing Hispanic demographic by pretending that boundaries shouldn’t matter. Trump’s infamous “wall” is actually just a metaphor for a political faction that believes boundaries do matter, especially in law, where ambiguity is a vice.

That narrative is also at odds with the Left’s multicultural principle, since their plea for the DACA kids rests on the idea that they’ve assimilated successfully into the very American common culture that multiculturalism opposes. The DACA poster kids exhibited on the cable news networks speak English as fluently as Anderson Cooper and Don Lemon. Yet the Left so strenuously opposes the idea that speaking English correctly has any importance that they have allowed several generations of American black ghetto kids to fail academically in inner city schools where language skills are deliberately neglected to avoid offending the underspeeched. In fact, these days anyone who proposes that correct English speech matters in America is automatically branded with the scarlet “R” for racist. Except, now it matters where the Dreamers are concerned.

Deplorable as they may be, sunk in job loss, anomie, opiate addiction, obesity, and tattoo collecting, the Trumpsters have a legitimate case that they’ve been shoved out of work and livelihoods by immigrants both legal and illegal, and nobody should be surprised at the animus this generates. It’s right and proper that congress should resolve the fate of the DACA kids by legislation, and that they should actively address reform of the 1965 immigration act, too. Things have changed. This isn’t your great-grandad’s America of burgeoning factories beckoning to the downtrodden abroad. This is a sunset industrial economy not really knowing where its headed, but indulging in grandiose fantasies of perpetual robotic leisure where actual work is obsolete but somehow everybody gets rich.

Trump was also correct to set a six month deadline on for congress to act. It is clearly their responsibility to do so, and the deadline is exactly the sort of boundary in thought-and-act that this lazy-ass nation needs to begin accomplishing anything on its long and neglected to-do list of pressing issues.