Is George Will now a compassionate Conservative?
George Will continues to amaze. Recently on Fox News to the consternation of Chris Wallace he, came out in favor of patriating the refugee children crossing the Texas border. George Will comes out in favor of treating the children at the border in an American manner, with compassion and morality.
“We ought to say to these children,” George Will said. “‘Welcome to America, you’re going to go to school, and get a job, and become Americans. We have 3,141 counties in this country. That would be 20 per county. The idea that we can’t assimilate these 8-year-old criminals with their teddy bears is preposterous.
Chris Wallace was taken aback and said, “You got to know, I mean I can just sort of feel them clicking off, that we’re going to get tons of email saying, ‘This guy doesn’t understand the border. Why should we be dealing with Central America’s problem? We can’t import the problem, they’ve got to deal with it there, and our border has to mean something.”
Without missing a beat which likely showed this was not only a planned response but a calculated response George responded. He did not respond with a simple message but with a thoughtful truth.
“We can handle this problem is what I’m saying. We’ve handled what Emma Lazarus called the ‘wretched refuse of your teeming shore’ a long time ago, and a lot more people than this,” said George Will. “Long term the most effective legislation Chris passed concerning immigrations wasn’t an immigration bill at all. It was Bill Clinton’s greatest act, the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which put the Mexican economy on the road to prosperity. We need to do something similar for the country form which these children are fleeing, including the fact of trying to get Americans to quit consuming so much of the drugs that are imported from these countries.”
In that one paragraph George Will stated much of what I discussed in my article titled “Will the un-American evil displayed towards refugees come back and haunt us.” Hopefully George Will’s statement will give some Conservative politicians the cover they need to do the right thing.
(h/t DailyKOS)