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First, kudos to CBS4 commentator Jon Keller for setting up a blog and joining into a discussion that many professional journalists and political analysts turn their nose up at.

Second, he’s far too quick to criticize others for a lack of policy seriousness, when he infact performs the kind of political analysis that only obliquely touches on policy discussion.

His latest post, for instance, blasts immigrant advocates as out of touch:

I can tell you from past reporting on this issue that growing numbers of legal immigrants and citizens are furious over the influx of the undocumented, some of whom bring with them a range of medical and social issues that put stress on local residents and government infrastructure. It’s a shame when illegals who just want to live here peacefully and be productive citizens get side-swiped by the negativity the bad apples generate, but advocates like Noorani dismiss those sentiments at their own risk. Case in point — the stunning rout of the bill that would have granted in-state tuition rates at state colleges to the children of illegals.

Attention, all fair-minded folks who value legal immigration and want to see immigrant rights respected: you can either drop the knee-jerk characterization of this anger as “racist” or “xenophobic” and engage in productive dialogue with the critics, or consign yourself and your cause to political oblivion.

So I went to the Globe article. Here’s what it said:

Ali Noorani, executive director of the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition, said the latest raids were ‘’yet another instance of ICE going after low-hanging fruit."

‘’There’s some validity that they’re out of status and they have not obeyed orders. But the overarching issue . . . is I’m not sure that Greater Boston is any safer after the people were picked up yesterday. I think I would rather see those dollars spent on finding terrorists and making sure our country is safer," he said.

That’s it, no other mention of him. No cries of racism or xenophobia. No knee-jerk sneering at opponents’ views, just a rhetorical statement that government resources would be better directed elsewhere. It’s similar to arguments about drug enforcement. Now, I think a stronger rhetorical move is needed - if you believe immigration laws unjust you really need to address the question of illegality and of the labor market head on  - and in that sense Keller’s on to something. But his straw man argumentation doesn’t help us.

Besides, is the problem really a case of bad apples? If one believes in the value of immigration laws and of treating their infraction seriously, then the problem includes "illegals who just want to live here peacefully and be productive citizens." Otherwise, we’d increase the number we allow in as legal immigrants. Then there are those who want to live here peacefully and be productive workers but don’t want to be citizens. Keller wants us to take seriously economic and "social" resentment (though never xenophobia!) of native working class constituencies, but from that perspective, it’s the productive illegals who impact the labor market most.

If I might contribute something, I’d schematically note that there are two bases of immigration stances here, the cultural/morality basis and the economic/self-interest basis. The two get intertwined. The policy stances on immigration don’t line up neatly along left/right lines. (See this discussion for a gauge of progressive non-cohesion). But we might outline three broad camps:

Anti-immigration. Wants restrictions on immigration for purposes of xenophobic nativism, controlling social service spending and/or a closed economy. Has the advantage of honesty and clarity about setting an illegal status and enforcing it. The disadvantage is an unnecessarily short-run and zero-sum understanding of the economy and government; it also shows a punitive stance toward those who are in fact contributing to our economy and our social fabric. Illegal immigrants get something out of jobs, but the rest of us get something out of their labor.

Immigrant rights. Generally at sympathy with immigrants and responds by a range of policy preferences: kinder, gentler, enforcement (closed borders)… to something akin to decriminalization (borders closed in theory, ajar in practice)… to full-on legalization (opening of borders). Pure examples of the first or third are not common, and the middle response is frought with a certain hypocrisy. The Clinton administration, for instance, was unwilling to press for loosening immigration law, but rather offered asylum on an ad-hoc basis. This camp, too, is disengenous when it acts as if there are no tradeoffs in looser immigration or laxer enforcement. The advantage, though, is that it takes the well-being of the working poor and the foreign-born seriously, and grasps how exploitative illegality can be for the illegal workers.

Employer/economic case. May take the form of strict self-interest, as in the view of the business community, or larger argument about the value of open labor markets, as in the Economist. It informs the Bush adminstration’s policy orientation, which has been nearly as frought with hypocrisy as the immigrant’s rights camp. That is, it’s happy to have illegality in theory but legal in practice, since loosening legal restriction is politically unfeasible or difficult. The plus side is a more robust understanding of economics - there’s a flipside to every transaction and "takers" of jobs are also "givers" of labor.

All three of these impulses are driving current U.S. immigration policy, in fits and starts. I happen to strattle #2 and #3, and thus to be heavily in favor of legalizing immigration. It’s no surprise that the bourgoisie leans toward these (even if progressives resist #3 for the same reason they resist free trade), as that class is most removed from labor market shift caused by immigration. But that doesn’t make them wrong on the merits, either.