(written with Peter Siavelis)

Did anyone even notice?  Last Sunday’s massive immigration rally was supposed to push political leaders towards comprehensive immigration reform.  Unfortunately it was largely overshadowed by the final vote on healthcare reform.  Hunt for coverage of the rally in the national press and you will find it, but you will have to hunt.

Yet Sunday’s vote on healthcare could still be of genuine benefit to immigration reform.  The victory on Sunday evening showed that the president and congress are able to legislate – that tough votes can be fought for and won. And once the real benefits of the healthcare overhaul sink in, much of Obama’s political capital may yet be restored to him.  If Sunday morning is any guide, he will need that capital: the ugly slurs hurled by Tea Party protesters at black lawmakers and the openly homosexual Congressman Barney Frank likely presage more ugliness as the debate on immigration reform moves forward.  Yet most Americans, including a number of leading Republicans,  remain strongly in favor of reform; and the case for it is compelling even in the depth of this recession.

• For rising unemployment has turned off the flow of undocumented workers. Fewer people are coming because there are fewer jobs to be had. The recession is exactly the right time to act, not the time to pause: time to act before the flow begins again.

• The results of present policy are perverse. They are adding to the number of the undocumented rather than bringing that number down. Walls trap people in as well as keep them out. People stay because tighter border patrols and the building of the wall make departure difficult – not simply re-entry more expensive. It is time to say to the Republican base, in language they think they own, that we need to tear down this wall.

• There is no evidence that unemployment is lower among undocumented workers than among those legally here. The reverse is likely the case, given the heavy concentration of such workers in the three industries hit hardest by the recession – construction, hospitality & leisure, and agriculture. The presence of undocumented workers actually hides the true degree of hardship being created by the financial meltdown. Recessions are not solved by shipping them overseas. We need more jobs, not fewer workers.

• Nor is there evidence of any large-scale increase in the desire of unemployed native-born Americans to re-colonize the grunt jobs at the bottom of the economy largely filled before the recession by undocumented workers. There is evidence, however, of diminishing support for half-hearted progressive politics in Washington. Native-born Americans hostile to immigration reform are already lost to the Republicans: so in 2010, as is 2008, the counterweight of the Latino vote will be critical. Democratic politicians need to be reminded that immediate comprehensive immigration reform is in their self-interest as well as in their platform. READ FULL POST

The debt that progressives owe to Jon Stewart and The Daily Show is large and growing. It certainly grew again last Thursday when the program delivered a much needed demolition job on Glenn Beck. The critique delivered that day has been made by others – not least by David Sarota and Adele Stan immediately after the CPAC insanity[i] – but never with quite the sharpness and wit that Stewart brought to the endeavor. Not that Stewart was alone this week in taking Beck to task. Even Peggy Noonan took time out in her weekend defense of the Fox News interview with the President to let her readers know that, to her, ‘Glenn Beck has long appeared to be insane”.[ii]

Good! Calling Glenn Beck to account is essential – essential, but not of itself necessarily enough. For Beck is not only the only sinner here. This is tip-of-iceberg stuff. Remember Michael Savage writing in 2003 of liberalism as “a mental disease…a destructive contagion more deadly than any force this country has ever faced”[iii]: or Rush Limbaugh telling the Heritage Foundation in November 2004 that conservatives “don’t have to compromise with depravity”.[iv] No, this is a well-established tradition – this denigration of liberals in medical or animal terms, this description of them as an infection, a cancer or as vermin who need removing, cutting out, or somehow eradicating. It is a well-established tradition on the extreme of the American Right, and it is one that is getting worse. As the President said at the National Prayer Breakfast in February, what we currently face in Washington DC and beyond is a troubling “erosion of civility”.[v] READ FULL POST

The great Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci once explained the success of the Russian Bolsheviks and the failure of their Western European comrades by using a military image from the First World War. When Lenin took the first trench in his fight with Czardom, the old regime had no supporting defensive trenches to fall back on. One campaign, one trench taken and the job was done. Not so in Western Europe. There, it was one damn trench after another. In Western Europe, the Left had to fight, win, and fight again.

But if Gramsci had wanted to see real political trench warfare – if he had wanted to be where the Left really has to fight, win and fight again – then he should have come to America!

That thought came to mind last week, when we were briefly in Scotland for a wedding. In the UK, as here, an election looms that the center-left might yet lose. The economic issues are the same – bank bailouts, job loss, home foreclosures, massive inequality and stubborn poverty. The economic issues are the same but the politics they generate are entirely different.

In the UK, as in so many parliamentary systems in Western Europe, one election campaign is normally enough for complete political defeat or victory. Parties cohere around programs that are distinct and different. Electorates vote for the program by voting for the party. What they vote for is what they get. Or if, once elected that is not the case – if the party fails to deliver – then the political price is straightforward. The electorate kicks the party out of office. READ FULL POST