BUSH CHOKES IMMIGRATION BILL

A reader sent me this link to a column reporting that the White House is trying to muffle the guest-worker issue this year.

Mr. Frist denies acting at the request of the administration, but after the president's own immigration proposals provoked a backlash from the right earlier this year, the White House appears reluctant to embrace the farm-workers bill even after top aides encouraged the proponents to proceed last year. "Is the leadership going to push back on issues that the White House would prefer not to deal with? I think that could have happened," said Sen. Larry Craig (R., Idaho), who confirmed that the administration did ask him not to offer the proposal last week. Rep. Howard Berman (D., Calif.), a chief sponsor of a companion bill in the House, is more blunt. "The White House told Frist, 'Don't let this come up,' " Mr. Berman said. " 'Not that we're against it. Not that we're for it. Just don't let it come up for a vote.' "

My hopeful interpretation of these moves. Bush supports immigration, but he knows the issue alienates his base. So he wants to keep it quiet in an election year; but he has mentioned it, so if he pushes hard for immigration in his second term, he can claim that people knew that's what he wanted and that it was part of his mandate. Very hopeful of me to think so, I admit.

I spent an evening volunteering at the Bush Campaign Headquarters a couple of weeks ago, and they had me sorting mail. Most of it was junk, but when there was a message we filed it. I remember two of them. "When Bush closes the borders then I'll send him some money." Another one was more succinct: "CLOSE THE BORDERS," it read, in huge, angry capital letters. I believe a Republican president will have to be the mover and shaker on this one, because the nativists to face down are in his party, just as a Democratic president had to tackle welfare in the 1990s, and civil rights in the 1960s.

I could be wrong. This is the best thing I have ever read about John Kerry:

Sen. John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic nominee, told a Hispanic audience in Phoenix recently that he would sign the legislation within minutes, if elected president.

Great!... unless he proves as brave and steadfast in supporting this as in his support for the war.

I should add that I disagree with the premises of this debate. We shouldn't let immigrants in because we need their cheap labor in the fields, or because it's useful for "law and order" to have them registered, or because it will get the Hispanics to vote for us. We should let them in because it is wrong to chain people in the borders of the country where they were born, because there is no moral basis for seizing a certain territory for a certain population and forbidding others to peaceably enter it, because migration should be recognized as a fundamental human right. Not legislation but civil disobedience will have to be the road to this goal, I think, just as it was in the pre-1960s South. I have a dream that this new liberty will come into being, not through the calculations of political consultants weighing this and that constituency, but through ordinary men and women who refuse to treat their fellow men and women differently because they crossed an invisible lines that can be described only in the language of violence, ordinary men and women who will hire, do business with and be friends with all who have come to this country by whatever means, who will do so openly, and who will have no fear of being jailed in the name of unjust laws; these ordinary men and women will tempt the powers that be, upheld by the majority, to do their worst; with their bodies and the lives they will put the question to we the people of the United States of America in order to form a more perfect union: what crimes are you willing to commit to perpetuate this injustice? And they will awaken the conscience of the nation, and we the people will remember that we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, whatever their race, their creed, their color, their language, and their place of birth. As long as lawmakers are still talking about "amnesty," as if trying to better one's lot through peaceable migration were a crime, we have a long way to go.