“An act of love”?

Jeb Bush said the debate over immigration reform needs to move past derisive rhetoric describing illegal immigrants.

 The former Florida governor said in an interview Sunday in College Station, Texas, that people who come to the United States illegally are often looking for opportunities to provide for their families that are not available in their home countries.

 “Yes, they broke the law, but it’s not a felony. It’s an act of love, it’s an act of commitment to your family,” Bush told Fox News host Shannon Bream at town hall event at the George Bush Presidential Library Center.   

“I honestly think that is a different kind of crime, that there should be a price paid, but it shouldn’t rile people up that people are actually coming to this country to provide for their families,” he said.

Where to start?

Is this a new criteria for leniency?  Are we differentiating between individuals who came over as unmarried young adults, and those who smuggled their entire family in, or left a family behind to send money back to? Or does Jeb Bush consider all illegal immigrants to be “providing for their families” in some form or another, whether it be their children, or a parent back home?

This sort of rhetoric bugs me for a couple reasons.

In the first place, politicians are practically canonizing Mexican immigrants to the United States.  They’re “hard workers”; we’re told repeatedly that they have a far stronger work ethic and are more capable and have more endurance at difficult jobs than Americans.  They have wonderful family values (never mind the fact that the second generation has abandoned those family values to have children outside marriage at high and ever-growing rates).  And now their motivation to immigrate and work under-the-table or with fake IDs is the pure and holy one of caring for their families, not the crass one of simply wanting to improve their own personal standard of living.

Can we not acknowledge that it is not a trivial thing to work under a false ID, often enough destroying someone else’s finances through identity theft?  (Don’t tell me we need to go after employers — the law explicitly says that you’re not allowed to question IDs that, upon visual inspection, appear valid, lest you discriminate.)  And how many articles do we need about workers severely injured and receiving charity care, because they were working under the table, with no worker’s compensation coverage or health and safety protections, before someone says, “hey, maybe we should do something about the proliferation of under-the-table work?  

This rhetoric of “family” is a mess.  Politicians love the phrase “working families” — all manner of policies are invented in support of “families” which are more sacred and holy than individuals.  Any act, whether illegal or just morally questionable, becomes more virtuous when undertaken to “support your family,” and suddenly illegal border-crossing and working under the table or with a false ID is a heroic act, the modern equivalent of Jean Valjean’s theft of a loaf of bread:

“You stole a loaf of bread.”
“My sister’s child was close to death, and we were starving — “
“You will starve again unless you learn the meaning of the law.”

Sing along with me now, “my name is Jean Valjean!”

But we’re not 19th century France — or, rather, Mexico isn’t.  Is it really necessary for us to have de facto open immigration from Mexico and ignore the corruption and other failures that produced that poverty in the first place?

UPDATE:  There’s a fuller quote at the Washington Post and the Daily Caller. His comments seem flaky, at best:

“There are means by which we can control our border better than we have and there should be penalties for breaking the law,” the former Republican Florida governor argued during an interview with Fox News’ Shannon Bream from the George H.W. Bush presidential library in College Station, Texas. ”But the way I look at this — and this is not, you know, I’m going to say this and it will be on tape, and so be it — the way I look at this is someone who comes to our country because they couldn’t come legally, they come to our country because their family’s, you know, a dad who loved their children was worried that their children didn’t have food on the table. And they, you know, wanted to make sure their family was intact and they crossed the border because they had no other means to work to be able to provide for their family. Yes, they broke the law, but it’s not a felony. It’s kind of — it’s an act of love. It’s an act of commitment to your family.”  

Bush, who says he will decide on a 2016 presidential run later this year, argued that those who cross the border illegally in search of a better life for their family should be differentiated from those “40 percent” of illegal immigrants who “come with legal visas and they overstay their bounds.”

Is Bush differentiating between those who can demonstrate that they are true “economic refugees” unable to provide for their family at home, and those who had a low, but tolerable, standard of living?  Unlikely.

And what to make of his differentiating between illegal border-crossers and visa overstayers?  What’s the difference?  Is the assumption that visa-overstayers were somehow not in desperate poverty to begin with, or they wouldn’t have been able to obtain the visa and make the trip in the first place?

Mickey Kaus speculates that he’s suggesting targeting visa overstayers because this is a convenient way to distinguish between Mexicans and other illegal immigrants (e.g., Poles, Chinese, etc.).  If so:  ick.  That moves is remarks from just bizarre to creepily calculating.