Let’s be honest here; America is a nation OF immigrants.  Not only that, but the greatness of our nation is in large part the product of the greatness of those immigrants.  This isn’t, or shouldn’t be, surprising.  After all, it is the precise individual who is willing to risk everything to come to an unknown land in order to build a better life for himself that creates the very greatness we’re discussing.

With that said I’ve been baffled by the resistance republicans have to immigrants and immigration reform.  Baffled for two reasons:

1. It is the leftist that is the statist.  It’s not the lovers of Liberty that want to empower the state to dictate the whos, the whys and the whens of an otherwise free people to decide where they wanna live and work.  Building a state that controls such thing is normally the domain of the left, of the democrat; of the statist.  It distresses me that the republicans have abandoned a principle based in Liberty like this.
2. The Latino population is not one that naturally is liberal.  The Latino is very conservative.  They are very religious, value a strong family and embrace personal responsibility in the form of a massive work ethic that not only supports the immediate family but often the extended family.  Even if that family is in another country.  By alienating the Latino, the republicans are walking away from a natural base.  And a base that is only going to grow.

All of which makes what Obama did today distressing:

(Reuters) – About 800,000 young illegal immigrants who came to the United States as children could be spared deportation under new immigration rules announced by President Barack Obama on Friday …

I’m not distressed that Obama made bad policy here, he didn’t.  Allowing immigrants who wanna live and work here the legal opportunity is absolutely the right thing.  And for this, I am in rare but enthusiastic support of the President.  Rather I’m distressed because the republicans have so utterly failed in the whole immigration debate.

This decision will garner support from the Latino vote.  And to be sure, those folks won’t suddenly turn into died in the wool leftists.  But, BUT, we know that politics is a team sport and soon, not very long to be sure, as people begin to affiliate with a “tribe” they will become a member of that tribe and we’ll find it hard to convert them back to their natural support.

Congratulations to President Obama.  Here I think he did the right thing.  And the right lost a massive opportunity to do the right thing as well.