This week, Ruben Navarrette wrote a piece in the Denver Post that could be best described as the most unoriginal thought on immigration cloaked as the most brilliant illumination Mr. Navarrette’s friends could possibly have been so blessed to see. In his piece, Navarrette spends much of his time bragging about how clever he was to predict to his friends ahead of time that a liberal Democrat administration and congress would be happy to do amnesty for illegal aliens or select a Supreme Court justice on the basis of skin color rather than content of character. Honestly, Navarrette, no one but you saw this coming.

However, poor Navarrette must tell his friends that not all is right in paradise today. For you see, because Americans are so racist, Dems will only be able to pick an Hispanic judge or do amnesty, but not both. Since we are so close to the end of the Obama administration, I can see how he might be right:

A month ago, before most Americans had ever heard of Sonia Sotomayor, I predicted to a group of friends that Latinos would get either a Supreme Court justice or immigration reform — but not both. … Advocates are now convening in symposiums or conference calls to search for a new strategy to convince Americans that it's time to fix a broken system.

And of course, this doesn’t make Mr. Navarrette all too special at all, but rather another of countless carnival barkers telling Americans it’s easier and cheaper to try to land the quarter on the bottle top than just to buy the bear outright. And in standard form, Navarrette uses standard-issue liberal condescension when he states Americans rather than Washington and most of the press are the ones who need to be convinced to fix a broken system.

Meanwhile, Washington has chosen to proceed with exacerbating a broken system with amnesty rather than fixing it by enforcing the laws put there for good reason and also looking at ways to make it easier for those who have already applied to legally immigrate when possible. Whether Washington further breaks the system through amnesty this year by legislation or by promoting a default amnesty of sorts by doing nothing (as the Obama administration is choosing to do with law enforcement) is immaterial.

Navarrette sees himself as part of the effete political class and thus views ordinary Americans as dumb and disconnected, putting himself among the profoundly anti-democratic crowd. Nevertheless, his accusations are hardly sound: It is ordinary Americans who do not live in ivory towers with private security and personal drivers who must daily face the crises of crowded and closing hospitals, gang-infested schools, the loss of English as a local language, increased murders, robberies, rapes, identity theft (which is the fastest growing crime in the U.S. in large part due to illegals stealing American identities to also steal their jobs); drunken auto accidents, hit-and-runs, and so on. All of which are committed in great numbers by those who are in the country illegally and about whom our government knows nothing in terms of prior criminal history. Americans don’t want to play the silly Washington race game because they know this is not about race; it’s about people. People of all races immigrate illegally and people of all races are harmed by illegal immigration.

And again we arrive back at the narrative that is so wrong to begin with: that Americans hold any responsibility for the conditions that forced illegal aliens to become illegal aliens. “And, they say, avoid making any demands on U.S. citizens, most of whom don't accept that they share any responsibility for the current situation, much less a duty to help correct it.” Apart perhaps from electing pro-NAFTA presidents, such an argument is ludicrous.

Finally, Mr. Navarrette comes clean:

Still, I'm in no hurry to let go of the racial angle. It's absolutely true that a big part of the anxiety that many Americans currently feel about increased immigration levels fits a historical pattern. What worries people most is what they see as the inferior quality of the immigrants coming ashore — or, if you prefer, crossing the border.

After all, that's one way that racism typically manifests itself: through a sense of superiority. It can also come through fear or animosity.

You'll find all these variations in the modern immigration debate, which has taken on a discernibly anti-Latino, specifically anti- Mexican, flavor.

Navarrette must therefore also be racist; after all, he seems to feel quite a bit of superiority over most Americans. If a sense of superiority regardless of race is how we define racism – and immigration is an issue that exists regardless of race – then we must conclude Navarrette is a racist.

Naturally, he misses the point yet again when he says Americans are secretly racist – an extreme meme hardly original or new among the left from a man who claims to be centrist on the issue of immigration. Americans care about what affects them directly, not who’s doing the affecting. If Navarrette and the left’s assessment were true, then it would be no leap to suggest that Americans (and remember, Americans are white, brown, black, and every other color) would have no trouble with a wave of millions of people who are foreign nationals “coming ashore – or, if you prefer, crossing the border”, among whom a high percentage are rapists, murderers, identity thieves, and social service leaches just so long as they were white.

It becomes quite plain that Navarrette and his liberal friends are not concerned with race at all, but cleverly trying to cynically use race as a tool to either ingratiate themselves with their peers, as Navarrette incessantly seems to suggest is his goal by constantly referring to his endless tidbits of wisdom bestowed upon his friends, or to promote particular political power through sociological gaming. 

Navarrette goes on to suggests he thinks Americans protest too much and should just gladly accept their racism:

Some Americans dispute this and insist that race and ethnicity have nothing to do with concerns over illegal immigration. Rather, what has so many people upset, they claim, is that it is — hello — illegal.

Rubbish. If that were true, the debate wouldn't lapse so quickly into talk of limiting legal immigration as well.

So by Navarrette’s own logic, talk of legal immigration is nothing other than code for, wait for it: being anti-Mexican, i.e. racist (as if all Mexicans belonged to the same race). As a grandson of legal immigrants, I personally find this offensive. It seems to be Navarrette, despite all of his talk of the need to fix a broken system who seems to delight playing with his race card the moment all issues are brought to the table for an honest discussion that he may not so much enjoy. He suggests, again, that if the bulk of illegal aliens weren’t from a country called Mexico, those mischievous racist Americans would have no problem whatsoever with it. This type of backward simple thinking serves only one purpose, and that is to shut down debate and put a bandage on the problem rather than fixing it.

Ironically, Navarrete concludes:

Which brings us to why it's important to be honest about racism in the immigration debate: Acknowledging it allows Americans, the children of immigrants, to empathize with new arrivals who suffer many of the same trials as those who came before them.

Indeed, perhaps Mr. Navarrette would do better to empathize with Americans, remembering that they too are the children of immigrants. Further, maybe at some point it would be possible for Mr. Navarrette to feign some empathy for the millions of legal immigrants waiting in line for years to become patriotic hardworking tax-paying Americans as countless others cut ahead, many of whom are criminals wanted in their own countries. Where is the empathy, Mr. Navarrette?

I suppose it is simply that it makes Mr. Navarrette feel too uncomfortable to put aside his own pride and self-aggrandizement among his politically-correct peers to stop for a moment and have real empathy for the truly innocent victims in all of this. After all, “The truth has a way of doing that. And any campaign that asks Americans to deny the truth to achieve a political goal asks too much.”