I’m upset about the so called “immigration debate”. The conservative position seems to be various shades of “no”, “fuck no!” and “launch them all over the Rio Grande via catapult”. Rod Dreher recently wrote a column that Roy at Alicublog tore apart with extreme prejudice. Trump makes ever more outrageous claims of deporting millions, and the rest of the Republican nominees trip over themselves trying to catch up. The US is built on the ruins of dozens of Native American nations, and on the graveyards of millions of Native American dead. It is a country born of conquest, extermination, subjugation and slavery. So to me at least, we as a country have a duty to make restitution as far as we can for the ugly crimes of our nation’s founding and continued existence. If we don’t we are no better than the bad old empires of Europe that so many of our ancestors fled to come here. There’s nothing unique about American resistance to immigration, certainly Mexico and Europe are no picnic for immigrants that show up without a loaded bank account, but we are a nation of immigrants. Immigration built this country for good or ill, and if we turn our backs on immigrants, we turn our backs on one of the few ways our country really can lay claim to “American Exceptionalism”. Here’s an example of a country that’s doing it right: Iceland.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/more-than-11000-icelanders-offer-to-house-syrian-refugees-to-help-european-crisis-10480505.html

Those immigrants also represent our responsibility. Our responsibility to do something to help the people our foreign policy has victimized in the name of fighting communism, or in the pursuit of ever higher profits. They represent our responsibility because climate change is caused by burning hydrocarbons, and we’ve been burning more for longer than any country on earth. They represent our responsibility to prevent or at least minimize the potential for disease and war and genocide. We can’t go back in time and stop the Rwandan genocide, we can’t go back in time and prevent the Armenian genocide, we can’t go back in time and save the Jews, the Roma and the gays from the holocaust. But we can do our best to shelter the people who need our help and are dying without it right freaking now.

Climate change keeps me up nights. Climate change is already redrawing the map of the world. According to a quick google search, over 3 million Syrians have fled the country, and over 6.5 million are internally displaced. That’s just one country. A decade of drought, and a civil war, and 9.5 million people pick up and move. 9.5 million people who want to eat 3000 calories a day. 9.5 million people who want to buy food, feed their families, sleep indoors, and work to build their dreams. 9.5 million people that have left everything behind because they had to, and now they need every bit of help they can get. That’s only a problem for a country that can’t harness that energy for constructive ends.

Yes, it could be said that thousands of immigrants are a problem. But they also represent an opportunity. They are thousands more customers for businesses, thousands more potential employees, thousands more soldiers if it comes to that. I keep thinking that it would be a great idea to restart the CCC and employ not just immigrants, but anyone who wants to work at park maintenance, trail building, erosion prevention and similar tasks And not just in parks, anywhere a person with a shovel is useful an immigrant would be useful too. And it would just be in parks and forests. How many new miles of dykes are we going to have to build to keep New York City or Boston or Miami dry? If we as a country can start being proactive with regard to the challenges we face in the next ten years, I think we could find a place to stay and a job for every American, and every refugee and or immigrant we can find.