Country’s fate lies with immigrants

Last time I saw U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell, he looked as if he were having a colonoscopy without anesthesia. But all he was doing was sitting next to President Barack Obama at the White House, in a photograph that made the front page of The New York Times after the mid-term elections.

You have to give the man credit, though. He didn’t even pretend that he likes the president.

Mr. McConnell’s recent campaign in Kentucky called for preventing immigration reform, the current big issue now horrifying the Republican Party because Mr. Obama has been saying he will make an executive decision to allow millions of undocumented immigrants to stay in this country temporarily.

Other leading Republicans are already talking tough about shutting down the government if the president takes unilateral action on immigration. They have said Mr. Obama needs to work with Congress to enact a law on immigration reform, or anything else.

Why should he? After the Senate overwhelmingly passed a bipartisan immigration bill in 2013, Speaker John Boehner wouldn’t even allow that bill to come up for a vote in the House of Representatives.

But never mind the facts. The Republican Party — newly empowered by an election victory fueled by huge corporate and conservative donors and ready to fight with passion, intensity and commitment for a pinched and desperately narrow worldview — would much rather deport 12 million people as soon as possible.

The Republican Party has a tremendous weak spot on this (and virtually every other issue, but that’s another story). It is forgetting the future. If you forget the future, the future forgets you.

And immigrants represent a good future for this country, if we legalize their status.  Immigrants provide this country with energy and drive, the zeal to improve their lives and the need to succeed. In improving their lives, they improve ours.

I have seen them — cab drivers and store workers, restaurant employees and maintenance men, from all over the world, from Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Bangladesh, Gambia, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast and Guyana, to name a few places — urging their children to read, learn and work hard. 

Many of them do not speak English well. But their children are learning to speak, read and write in English. Many of these children possess something you can’t teach — they have a fierce intellectual energy, a 10,000-degree fire to achieve.

Mr. Obama, with his last election behind him, is finally fighting hard to help these immigrants. The American Dream lives on for them. We should help them find it. 

Mike Gold lives and works in the Bronx. Point of view is a column open to all.