Iqra’i

Insofar as Noah’s response to my post of yesterday can be summarized as “The most pragmatically viable response is to blame employers because it’s better than blaming immigrants,” I agree completely. Insofar as it can be summarized as “We shouldn’t be talking about changing our own perception in ways that can’t make for more viable public narratives” I disagree vehemently.

The initial reason that I wrote the post was actually that I’m frustrated generally with a refusal to expect business owners to see their workers as human beings rather than warm bodies and this is a very good example of that. But Noah’s attribution of it to my radical localism on immigration is also valid. I suspect that a paradigm shift will be a more durable solution to the issue than even the most liberal legislation will, and the xenophobes are more likely to change their minds when they get to know actual immigrants — or at least have to confront them at marches and town-hall meetings — than through narratives delivered on the national stage.

The short-term effects will be pretty bad in places like Hazleton or Prince George’s County, but the short-term effects will be pretty bad there anyway, and what ICE is doing — in those cities as well as more immigrant-friendly places like New Haven and LA — is worse by orders of magnitude. And if the news out of the Conference of Mayors is any indication, local governments are largely at least somewhat pro-immigrant in their outlook. So pragmatically we’re in decent shape.

I get the importance of narratives. But I suspect it’s the smaller, private changes in attitude that will end up driving immigration reform on a human scale.