We badly want an outside cause — some foreign malevolence — to have been responsible for what happens to America. Some of us still look at the two Boston bombing suspects and see American. But a lot of us apparently see “foreign.” We see “Muslim.” Now, having learned the geography a bit, we latch onto “Chechnya.”
Even President Obama, when he addressed the nation on Friday night after Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was captured, seemed to be searching for answers. “Why did young men who grew up and studied here, as part of our communities and our country, resort to such violence?” he said. …NYT
Grew up and studied here like, oh, the guy in Aurora or the kids next door at Columbine? The Newtown shooter? What strikes me is not the foreign-ness but the ages and gender. And not the alien-ness but the alienation.
Of course, a lot of us are having trouble with drone strikes that wipe out whole Muslim families. You don’t have to be Muslim to carry the moral weight of Americans’ actions on others’ soil — with body counts higher than in Boston. But we seem to have taken the lead when it comes to xenophobic fears.
The country is beginning to discuss seriously the most sweeping overhaul of immigration since 1986, with hearings in the Senate last week and this week, and a possible vote by early summer. After years of stalemate, the mood has shifted sharply, with bipartisan Congressional coalitions, business and labor leaders, law-enforcement and religious groups, and a majority of the public united behind a long-delayed overhaul of the crippled system.
Until the bombing came along, the antis were running out of arguments. They cannot rail against “illegals,” since the bill is all about making things legal and upright, with registration, fines and fees. They cannot argue seriously that reform is bad for business: turning a shadow population of anonymous, underpaid laborers into on-the-books employees and taxpayers, with papers and workplace protections, will only help the economy grow.
About all they have left is scary aliens. …NYT editorial