17 The Post’s article cites a source “familiar with the meeting.” It was clear then and is clearer now, however, that some of his cabinet members strongly disagreed with him. Trump’s then secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, had criticisms of the deal but advocated for its continuation, noting that the United States was working with the other signatory parties, “our European allies in particular, to ensure we are fully enforcing all aspects of that agreement.” Tillerson was eventually forced out of the Trump cabinet.
18 We don’t even know what the agreement entails, much less whether Kim promised “no backsies.” Following his June 2018 meeting with the North Korean dictator, the president tweeted triumphantly: “Before taking office people were assuming that we were going to War with North Korea. President Obama said that North Korea was our biggest and most dangerous problem. No longer—sleep well tonight!” The North Korean leader’s own post-summit remarks are studiously ambiguous. At a meeting in September with South Korean president Moon Jae-in, Kim said that his country would permanently dismantle its nuclear production facilities but refused to acknowledge commitments that North Korea would give up its nuclear weapons or missiles. American intelligence agencies have determined that North Korea’s network of ballistic missile bases is still active.
19 Since 9/11, we have fought the longest wars in the country’s history. If we are in Afghanistan in 2021, a not unlikely possibility, we will have been there for a fifth of a century. No American high school senior will know a time in his or her life when the United States was not waging this war. In the post-9/11 conflicts, according to cautious estimates, we have spent roughly $5.6 trillion. We have lost nearly seven thousand American lives.
20 The importance of these values—and of the US role in sustaining them, though our own record is imperfect—was underscored by Václav Havel, the president of a newly free Czechoslovakia, in a speech to a joint session of Congress in 1990: “As long as people are people, democracy, in the full sense of the word, will always be no more than an ideal. One may approach it as one would the horizon in ways that may be better or worse, but it can never be fully attained. In this sense, you, too, are merely approaching democracy. You have thousands of problems of all kinds, as other countries do. But you have one great advantage: You have been approaching democracy uninterruptedly for more than two hundred years, and your journey toward the horizon has never been disrupted by a totalitarian system.”
21 To this, Senator Bob Corker (R-TN) reacted on Twitter: “I never thought I’d see the day a White House would moonlight as a public relations firm for the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.”
22 He imposed tariffs on France, the UK, and Germany in the name of protecting national security while advocating for Russia to rejoin the G7 after the group expelled it for violating the principle of state sovereignty. Instead of working with our NAFTA partners to make North America more competitive against China, he imposed harsh tariffs on Mexico and Canada.
THE TEST OF A FREE PEOPLE
The story behind a rare and improbable
bipartisan agreement on immigration—and how
a minority in Congress destroyed it.
I. Rabbit Hole
You don’t need to know me very well or for very long to know two things. One is that whenever Congress can’t seem to fight its way out of a paper bag, I turn for comfort to the story of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, which brought the United States into being. Two hundred thirty years after the fact, the Convention’s outcome has the aura of inevitability. It didn’t seem so at the time; it could have gone off the rails in so many ways. That it didn’t was the result of a particular conception of politics, a particular notion of political respect, and a particular idea of what a citizen is and what the duties of a citizen entail. If the Convention was going to succeed, the overwhelming majority of delegates would have to agree, and for that to happen, there would have to be compromise. The story of the Constitutional Convention embodies what ought to be our political standards.
The second thing you learn about me quickly is that a poem by Walt Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” lies close to my heart. If the “miracle at Philadelphia” set the political bar, Whitman set a different kind of bar, explaining how he saw all of us—and how we should see ourselves—as a people. As one people.
Our politics, our people: they’re related but not the same thing. The relationship is sometimes simple, sometimes complicated. A republic like ours requires that both—including our perception of both—enjoy a condition of good health. And it’s hard to think of an issue where both are subjected to greater challenge and strain than the issue of immigration. We call ourselves a nation of immigrants—as to a great extent we are—and yet the prospect of future immigration, legal and illegal, fills many with ambivalence. If we’re honest, we have to acknowledge that many Americans harbor fears about what immigration will do to us as a people. Which in turn creates a political problem: how do we craft a set of policies that accommodates those who feel they have a dog in this fight—which, in this case, is just about everyone?
I’ve already written of my own background: on one side postwar Jewish refugees from Poland, on the other a line that goes back to the Mayflower. These days, the very name of that ship bestows on some an imprimatur of age-old legitimacy, although if Fox News existed at the time (as Jay Parini, among others, has observed) it would probably have called the disembarking men and women—desperate, dirty, and diseased—a caravan of asylum seekers. I was deeply engaged with immigration as a school superintendent in Denver and then again when I came to the US Senate and was part of a group known as the Gang of Eight. We hammered out a comprehensive package of immigration reforms that passed in my own chamber of Congress but was derailed by partisan obduracy and ugly nativism in the House. The history of that effort illustrates what politics can accomplish when the majority of Americans, and the politicians who represent them, have the will to overcome the factions standing in our way—and also what politics can destroy when a small minority sees politics as a “winner take all or no one takes anything” proposition.
Through all these years, immigration has been at the center of my concerns. I’ve flown along the US-Mexico border in a Black Hawk helicopter with Senator John McCain, one of my Gang of Eight colleagues, and visited detention centers where undocumented people were being held—in one case, parents who had been forcibly separated from their children. Many of the victims of the Colorado floods I described earlier were people of uncertain status—reluctant to reach out for assistance because they feared being sucked into a bottomless legal rabbit hole. I have attended many naturalization ceremonies and will never forget the one at Fort Carson, Colorado, in 2014, when thirteen young members of the army in their camouflage fatigues took the oath of citizenship. They came from eleven different countries. For years I kept a list of their names on a piece of paper in my wallet—reciting it to anyone who would listen—until it disintegrated from overuse.
And I remember the day in January 2018 when my senatorial colleagues Dick Durbin and Lindsey Graham returned from a meeting in the Oval Office, both visibly shaken after hearing President Trump complain that the United States was taking too many immigrants—legally—from what he referred to as “shithole countries,” meaning ones whose people have skin that is black or brown. In the same meeting, the president reneged on his vow to support a bipartisan plan to revive the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy, an Obama-era effort that allowed people brought by their parents into the United States as children, without proper identification, to remain in the country and apply for citizenship. Trump had unilaterally ended the program, throwing seven hundred thousand young men and women, who called themselves Dreamers—some of whom were active-service military personnel or veterans and all of whom had known themselves as Americans for virtually their entire lives—down their own legal rabbit hole.
Although a bipartisan agreement was there for the taking, Stephen Miller,
one of the president’s vociferous anti-immigration aides, stepped in at the eleventh hour and apparently produced bone spurs in the president’s resolve.1 Before long the administration would be pursuing a policy of wresting the children of detainees—thousands of them—from their parents, while at the same time failing to keep track of which children belonged to which mothers and fathers.
I will come back to all this. But first a detour to another era and a reminder about a different way politics can be conducted—and in some places, at some times, still is.
II. The Colorado Compact
On the morning of September 17, 1787, when delegates gathered one last time to decide whether to affix their signatures of support to the final draft of the Constitution, Benjamin Franklin offered the opening remarks. He was eighty-one and frail, so he asked his Pennsylvania colleague, James Wilson, to read the remarks for him. Addressing the Convention president, George Washington, Franklin began with humble irony:
I doubt too whether any other Convention we can obtain, may be able to make a better Constitution: For when you assemble a Number of Men to have the Advantage of their joint Wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those Men all their Prejudices, their Passions, their Errors of Opinion, their local Interests, and their selfish Views. From such an Assembly can a perfect Production be expected? It therefore astonishes me, Sir, to find this System approaching so near to Perfection as it does; and I think it will astonish our Enemies, who are waiting with Confidence to hear that our Councils are confounded, like those of the Builders of Babel, and that our States are on the Point of Separation, only to meet hereafter for the Purpose of cutting one another’s throats. Thus I consent, Sir, to this Constitution because I expect no better, and because I am not sure that it is not the best.
Franklin’s warm and humorous words defy the norms of today’s political talk. Where is the outrage and indignation? The melodrama of polarization and animosity? The dog whistles to special interests and intemperate voting blocs? Anyone who has glanced at eighteenth-century political oratory knows it can get harsh fast. Franklin’s speech could not be further from what we tolerate in most of today’s politicians and serves as a reminder that we ought to demand better.
The Convention had come to order nearly four months earlier. It gathered delegates from twelve of the thirteen colonies. By today’s reckoning, the group was nearly homogeneous. All were white men, wealthy by the standards of the time. Some, but not all, had been revolutionaries. Most enslaved others, and in the end every one of them could live with that. They expressed their fear of direct democracy routinely and designed a government in which voters, all of them male, directly elected the members of only one chamber, the House of Representatives. (Senators were originally elected by state legislatures.) No one in the room would have argued that there was a place for women or men without considerable property among the delegates, let alone for Native Americans or slaves. We can never pass by this moment in our history without remembering how the legacy of these tyrannies persists to this day, tarnishing all aspects of our heritage, even those liberties the framers helped construct and that we today prize the most.
In his remarks, however, Franklin paid attention to the diversity of his fellow delegates’ views, not their like-mindedness. In so doing, he reminds us that during those months of deliberation, there was no guarantee they would leave the meeting with anything to take back to the people. Certainly by the Convention’s end, after months in close confinement, those in the room had a deeper appreciation of one another’s prejudices, passions, errors of opinion, local interests, and selfish views. These are the inevitable qualities of any group of people dedicated to completing a political task. Somehow, out of many points of view, they found a single political direction. Out of many, one. These are the kinds of differences that every minute today in Washington undermine efforts that are far less momentous.
Franklin did not come right out and say it, but one meaning of his remarks is this: only those who never undertake to accomplish a political task get to keep their personal views utterly intact and uninfluenced by someone else’s. More than two centuries after Franklin spoke and sixteen hundred miles west of Philadelphia, I saw this reality firsthand as I entered public life in Colorado. What struck me then is how close the practice of politics in the state sometimes came to embodying the country’s founding spirit (as politics there still does). What strikes me now is how vast the difference has become between politics as it is conducted in Washington and politics as it is conducted at other levels of government. The issue of immigration offers a case in point.
Colorado is a Spanish word. My state is named for the river that bisects it, whose own name came from its red-colored waters. Colorado abounds in Spanish names: Las Animas, Trinidad, Alamosa, Durango. In the San Luis Valley, Spanish land-grant ranches still exist from a time when that part of the state lay within Spain’s Mexican territory. There, just outside the state’s oldest town, San Luis, you will find a stone marker identifying the families entitled to draw water from Colorado’s first irrigation ditch, the People’s Ditch. The name Salazar stands among them, and my predecessor in the Senate, Ken Salazar, comes from that family.
As the schools superintendent in Denver, I ran a district that was 57 percent Latino, 20 percent African American, and 20 percent Anglo. Our Latino students, like their families, were diverse. Some came from families that had been in Colorado for generations—centuries before any English-speaker. Others were new to the United States, brought across our southern border as children. I often met high schoolers who realized for the first time that they were not American citizens and therefore were prohibited from attending Colorado public universities for the price of in-state tuition—a flaw we eventually remedied.
It was not the only flaw. When I became a senator, I followed Ken Salazar’s advice and began traveling in the state from the outer edges inward. Again and again I encountered disappointment with the immigration system overseen by the federal government. At ski resorts, I heard about how hard it was to hire bilingual foreign students as seasonal workers (they’re essential in helping with international tourists who want to take skiing lessons in their native tongue); at bioscience companies around Boulder, I heard about promising university graduates forced to return home to China or India because they had been tripped up by an administrative hurdle in the visa process. Immigrant advocates shared concerns about people who had lived in the United States for decades in the uncertain shadows of a cash economy.2
Although a wide range of Coloradans from differing perspectives found our immigration system broken and ineffective, I came to realize that they were not talking to one another and were largely unaware of one another’s concerns. I also realized that the way they spoke about their concerns didn’t sound much like the political debate in Washington or on cable news, which favored argument over agreement. In an effort to bring Coloradans together around immigration, in early 2012 I asked Hank Brown, a former Republican senator, to join me as a cochair of what we called the Colorado Compact.3 My staff and I fanned out across the state to meet with hundreds of Coloradans on their home turf, and with them we hammered out a set of principles that reflected a statewide consensus on immigration. By doing the work together, we established relationships across significant political differences, relationships that endure to this day.
The Colorado Compact recognized that immigrants are an inseparable part of Colorado’s communities, history, and economy. It also recognized that immigration policy is a federal matter, one of the responsibilities delegated to Congress by the Constitution. The Compact called on Colorado’s congressional delegation to pursue an immigration policy at the federal level “that protects our borders, keeps our communities safe, and improves our immigration system.” It then described a set of policy priorities that included the following.
• Ensuring our national security: the immigration system must protect our citizens, communities, and national borders.
• Str
engthening our economy: acknowledging that immigrants make beneficial economic contributions as workers, taxpayers, and consumers, the immigration system should address the needs of businesses and the interests of workers. It must include a responsive visa system that meets the demands of Colorado’s economy.
• Family: immigration policies should prioritize keeping close families together in order to ensure the most supportive home environments for children.
• Effective enforcement: enforcement strategy must improve public safety and target criminal activity. At the same time, it must provide a reasonable and predictable regulatory environment that considers the interests of and unintended consequences to businesses, workers, and consumers. Furthermore, as part of a broader reform effort, the government must provide businesses with an accurate, reliable, and low-cost way to determine who is permitted to work.
• Common sense: immigration policies must provide a sensible path forward for immigrants who are here without legal status, are of good character, and are committed to becoming fully participating members of our society and culture.
It took work, but the first group to endorse the Colorado Compact was Club 20, the “voice” of Colorado’s Western Slope—a conservative coalition of businesses, governments, and tribes in the state’s twenty westernmost counties. Around Club 20, we assembled a group of supporters as diverse as the state itself, including the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association, chambers of commerce, county sheriffs, labor leaders, and immigrant advocates. These groups had their differences, but when we invited them to the University of Denver in December 2012 to announce that we had finalized the Compact, what captured their imagination was their combined size and diverse nature.
The Land of Flickering Lights Page 21