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Conservative Chronicle
IMMIGRATION: January 3, 2016
Merkel’s bold move and a needed correction
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ime magazine made a solid news judgment in naming German Chancellor Angela Merkel its 2015 “Person of the Year.” The flood of refugees and immigrants from the Middle East and Africa into Europe, the greatest wave of migrants since World War II, is the world-changing event of the decade, and Merkel is the individual most responsible for rolling out Germany’s welcome mat to more than a million asylum seekers. “It was an audacious act that, in a single motion, threatened both to redeem Europe and endanger it,” Time wrote.
IT WAS AN audacious act — and no one knows better than Merkel how unmanageable it is. In July, the chancellor endured a painful televised confrontation with a Palestinian teen, who, in fluent German, told Merkel that the threat of deportation kept her from enjoying the life she sees others living. “As long as I don’t know that I can stay here, I don’t know what my future will be,” the girl said. Visibly upset, Merkel told the 14-year-old that Germany “just can’t manage” to help every refugee and asylum seeker. In September, Merkel threw caution to the wind and dispensed with standard European Union asylum procedures. The gesture was seen as a green light not only by desperate Syrians fleeing violence but also by economic refugees from Africa and Afghanistan who saw the moment as perhaps a final opportunity to squeeze into Europe before the door slams shut. A disapproving Hungarian official told the Wall Street Journal, “The Germans think they’re the Americans of Europe.” Here’s another parallel between Germany and the United States: The day comes when governments have to enforce immigration laws, even if they don’t want to. In the coming weeks, the Washington Post reported, the Obama administration is expected to deport Central Americans who surged across the border in 2014 but did not qualify for asylum. In December, Germany stepped up deportations of refugees not qualified for asylum status. At a news conference, Merkel made clear that many Afghans seeking asylum will be sent home. “Germany is saying, ‘We’re going to deport everyone (who doesn’t qualify),’” observed Jessica Vaughan of the pro-enforcement Center for Immigration Studies. “They’re actually starting to remove people, and it’s going relatively smoothly. That should be a lesson to the U.S.” Germany’s articulation should be a lesson to Washington. German Parliament member Mark Hauptmann gave two reasons Afghans are unlikely to qualify for asylum. First, he told NPR, “if we look at the people who are leav-
ing the country, they are the young ones, rules. “I think the big difference is that the better-educated ones, and those ones Merkel seems to mean what she says,” are needed to build up Afghanistan.” Vaughan added, unlike the Obama adtion, which enforces Also: “We send our troops; we send our ministragration law spotcitizens there to protect Afghans and to immitily, and then rebasically create luctantly. safe environments Now Merkel in Afghanistan. finds herself back And then people (c) 2016, Creators Syndicate where she was in from Afghanistan July. She knows are coming as sothat there are good people who want called war refugees here to Europe.” nothing more than to be good Germans VAUGHAN TOLD me that she ad- — but she also knows that Germany mires Merkel for wanting to help Syr- cannot be the country that it is if it acian refugees, but unfortunately, the commodates everyone who wants in. chancellor’s rhetoric “came across as an With too much traffic, any welcome open invitation to anyone who can get mat wears thin. Thus, Merkel must there.” To set things right, Merkel had “manage” who gets to stay in Germany to set clear boundaries and enforce the — if she wants to maintain the support
Debra J.
Saunders
of German voters who, with reason, fear that their safety net cannot handle the strain of a million-plus refugees. Credit Merkel with articulating a policy and then refining it when she had to confront its unintended consequences. She knew the political cost and is likely to pay it someday. FOR HIS PART, President Obama throws out bromides — for example, “That’s not who we are.” Everyone can agree with that statement because no one is sure exactly what it means. Meanwhile, the administration signs executive orders rewarding undocumented immigrants for flouting the law and then, the next day, threatens to actually enforce the law. And always about politics.
PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS: January 3, 2016
Before government became reviled
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oon, voters will have the opportunity and impertinence to insert themselves into the 2016 presidential conversation that thus far has been the preoccupation of journalists and other abnormal people. The voting will begin in Iowa, thanks to Marie Jahn. When, after 38 years as recorder for Plymouth County in northwest Iowa, Jahn decided to retire in February 1975, local Democrats decided to throw her a party. When it came to attracting a speaker, the best they could entice from their party’s national ranks was a former one-term governor of Georgia. According to Steven Hayward in The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order: “Carter’s obscurity was confirmed when he appeared on the syndicated TV game show What’s My Line? He stumped the panel, which not only didn’t recognize him, but failed to guess he was a state governor. When pollster George Gallup drew up a list of 38 potential Democratic presidential candidates in 1975, Carter’s name was not on the list.” ELEVEN MONTHS after the fete for Jahn, Jimmy Carter finished second in the hitherto obscure Iowa caucuses, behind “undecided.” This semi-triumph became his springboard to Olympus. The caucuses would never again be obscure. The moral of this cautionary tale is that voters can be startlingly disruptive. Perhaps they are somewhat less likely to be so today. Surprises might be more difficult to spring now that there is saturation journalism about presidential campaigns that are in high gear a year before the first votes are cast.
But American politics often has had quirky aspects, as historian Morton Keller demonstrates in his America’s Three Regimes: A New Political History (2007). The Republican Party, Keller says, became known as the Grand Old Party in the 1880s, when it was about 25 years young. In 1840, when William Henry Harrison, scion of wealthy Virginia planters, ran for president as the hardscrabble “log cabin and hard cider candidate,” the resulting paraphernalia included glass
George
Will
(c) 2016, Washington Post Writers Group
log cabins containing whiskey from Pittsburgh’s E.C. Booz distillery, which enriched American slang. The Era of Good Feelings, the decade after 1815, was, Keller says, more an Era of No Feelings: In the 1820 presidential election, Richmond’s 12,000 residents produced 17 votes. Only 568 of Baltimore’s 63,000 residents voted. Nine percent of those eligible in New Jersey voted. No one will ever call 2016 part of an Era of Good Feelings. If, however, Donald Trump’s vitriol pumps up the number of voters, this will at least lay to rest the canard that high voter turnout is a sign of social health. GIVEN THE pandemic distaste for today’s politics, it is consoling to remember that things change. In the late 19th century, Robert Ingersoll, aka “The Great Agnostic,” was the nation’s most outspoken atheist and a leading Republican, a combination unlikely today. In the third decade of the 20th century, even a
politician with national aspirations could be proudly parochial: The Democrats’ 1928 presidential nominee, New York Gov. Al Smith, reportedly said he would rather be a lamppost on Park Row than the governor of California, and when asked his thoughts about the problems of states west of the Mississippi, he supposedly replied, “What are the states west of the Mississippi?” In 1952, the Democratic presidential nominee, Adlai Stevenson, dismayed by the mainstream media’s conservatism, fretted about “a one-party press in a two-party country.” Today, there is a sense in which there are few two-party states. In the presidential election 40 years ago, Carter against President Gerald Ford, 20 states were won by five points or less, including the six most populous states: Calif., N.Y., Pa., Texas, Ill., Ohio. (Note the absence of Florida, now the third-most populous state.) In 2012, just four states were decided by five points or less (N.C., Fla., Ohio, Va.). Today, Larry J. Sabato, Kyle Kondik and Geoffrey Skelley of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics identify just seven states they consider “super-swingy:” Colo., Fla., Nev., Ohio and Va, all of which voted for George W. Bush and Barack Obama twice, and Iowa and N.H., which have voted Democratic in three of the last four elections. BUT, AGAIN, things change. “One session of the Connecticut Legislature in the 1790s,” Keller writes, “devoted itself primarily to imposing a tax on dogs. The next session was given over to discussing whether or not to remove that levy.” This was, of course, long ago, before government became ambitious, caring and reviled.