BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON
Reprinted from Washingtonexaminer.com
Benonia Brown immigrated to the United States from Europe and settled in Southhampton, MA somewhere around 1800. He and his wife, Sibbel, moved to Ohio and Benonia enlisted in the First Regiment of the Ohio Militia to fight for this country in the War of 1812. He was my great, great, great-grandfather. I bring up Grandpa Brown for the benefit of Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, who is terribly confused about who is and who isn’t a new American.
Gov. O’Malley seems to think illegal immigrants are new Americans. They are not. They are neither new nor American. They are people in this country in violation of Federal law and that makes them felons. They do not have a right to be here. That’s the bottom line, no matter what your views are on national immigration policy. It doesn’t matter whether you are a compassionate soul or thoroughly insensitive sop. It doesn’t matter whether an illegal immigrant is doing a good job working next to you in a factory or manicuring your tall fescue.
They—estimated at 11 million–are here illegally. They are not new Americans. Benonia Brown was a new American.
The millions more who are here legally, obeying the law, making personal sacrifices; making contributions to society and the economy; waiting patiently for their turn to stand up and take the oath of citizenship, they are or soon will be new Americans. It is these new Americans whose honesty and legitimacy are being trivialized by political leaders like Gov. O’Malley who can’t distinguish between them and those taking the illegal shortcut to the American dream.
Gov. O’Malley described illegal aliens as “new Americans” in a debate with his challenger, former Gov. Bob Ehrlich. According to news accounts, O’Malley said, “sadly, as political football, there is this nativism rising up and this desire to blame new Americans for the problems of our economy.” He continued, “New Americans didn’t run Wall Street into the ground. New Americans didn’t destroy our savings. New Americans didn’t manipulate intelligence information to get us into conflicts we might not otherwise have gotten into.”
Nobody is blaming illegal immigrants for the economic recession, the housing market collapse or the Iraq war. His comments just defy logic and common sense and reflect a degree of desperation and immaturity unbecoming a governor.
There is plenty of fault to find in the presence of so many illegal immigrants in this country and in this area, including the estimated $1 billion cost to the State of Maryland alone. But what’s the point? If the cost were zero and there were little impact on crime or drug traffic, the bottom line would still be the same. There are 11 million people here illegally, in violation of the law and in violation and contradiction of the entire spectrum of immigration and customs public policies we have enacted over 230 years in the U.S. Their presence here mocks the integrity of our borders and the discredits social and economic structures that are unable to absorb them as free and dignified human beings.
Gov. O’Malley may have simply let his compassion overtake his common sense. That’s fine. We all want to be compassionate about the plight of human beings who are desperate enough to risk life and limb crossing the borders to get here, particularly the innocents, the children, who are dragged across or born here. We simply cannot abandon them.
There is no need to question Gov. O’Malley’s personal motivations. However, his use of the term new Americans was deliberate and contrived. It offered up good cause to question his political motivations. Press reports said he made eight clear references to “new Americans” throughout his presentation. I know a little about political marketing. You don’t make eight references like that unless it is part of a carefully orchestrated, premeditated language manipulation strategy intended to change the tone, the terms and the perceptions of the immigration debate in Maryland. It was enough to make language guru Frank Luntz blush.
Gov. O’Malley’s strategy is fatally flawed. Playing word games only exacerbates that crisis, further polarizes the issue, and makes arriving at some kind of solution on immigration reform even more difficult. We can do better. I hope we can find a way to secure our borders and then deal on a long-term basis with the immigrant crisis in a systematic and humane way, but simply re-labeling illegal immigrants isn’t even a sincere good beginning.
Editors’s Note: Mike Johnson is a former journalist, who worked on the Ford White House staff and served as press secretary and chief of staff to House Republican Leader Bob Michel, prior to entering the private sector. He is co-author of a book, Surviving Congress, a guide for congressional staff. He is currently a principal with the OB-C Group.