The other day, the Dr. and I were down in D.C. for a little R&R and time with her family. We had gotten a nice hotel (thanks Priceline Negotiator), part of Dr.'s birthday gift, staying right off New Jersey Ave. in town. Leaving the cold rain of New York, we decided to enjoy the warm weather and spend most of the morning strolling from Columbia Heights, down through U Street and around the Shaw neighborhood. There's some great views of the town from the heights, and the row homes remind me of south Brooklyn, little patches of grass that bring some color to the grey stoned stoops.
While walking down 9th Street NW, back to the hotel, a woman passed us with a tire that must have ust blown out. She was an older woman, and after her attempts for help were met with little kindness, the Dr. decided to extend an offer to help change the tire. I was less in favor of this idea, since neither of us own a car. {I got yelled at once by the guy behind the glass at a petro station after trying to fill a car up with guess and continually resetting the pumps. If I couldn't even fill a car up with gas, how could I possibly change a tire?}. Good spirited as she is, I folowed her across the street and we proceeded to act like we had some clue of what we were doing. {I grew up watching NASCAR, so it couldn't be that hard, right?}.
This post isn't so much about how to change a tire--though make sure the jack is on the steel part of the frame, or else the side door will bow out. Rather, while trying to explain what I do to the woman I had a sense of clarity. Usually, people look at you kind of weird when you tell them you work for a think tank. So, I usually have to find some real life experience to explain. While tightening the lug nuts onto the spare tire, I started to think about the metaphor as progress in motion, like the wheels of a car. There's been a lot of talk around jump starting the economy, and I think this is probably what was going through my mind at the time.
anyways, immigration is one of the key areas I focus on, and there's been a lot of talk on how immigrants play a vital role in our economy and to ignore them is like losing a lug nut on the tire. If loosened, the tire begins to shake and the alignment begins to pull you off course. You might still have four lug nuts, but you're going to find that the ride is pretty rough unless you tighten the fifth (immigration).
In order for us to pull ourselves out of the mudd that is the economic slowdown, we're going to need to have all the lugs as tight as possible. The chance for comprehensive reform is rising again for the pro-immigrant movement, and the opportunity to bring about real change for an issue that has needed real solutions for years seems finally on the horizon.
The reality is that true comprehensive immigration reform will help the entire nation move forward carrying the standard of progress. There are those who argue against reform and push back against the contributions that immigrants bring to our country and our economy. Clearly, they've forgotten our past as a nation. Like a hub sparking itself across the pavement, the immigration policies had a blow out some time ago. You can't expect to go nowhere with a blown out tire, unless you want to really mess up your car. For the almost 12 million immigrants who reside in our country, there's been little success at going anywhere in America.
My family first arrived in Boston in 1631, long before there were any cars, and hardly any buggies. Progress has made things a lot more difficult since then. {Have you ever tried to blow out a wooden wheel?}. But, too, it's made things easier; well, unless you have to drive through modern day Boston. Anti-immigrant agendas have made it so difficult to integrate into our country, that we've lost the founding values of our nation. All it will take is some creative minds and a will fueled by the desire to make America the Land of Opportunity once again. There will be push-back. For every action, there is a reaction. But for every action, there's also momentum that didn't exist before.
So, if a stranger will trust a blind man to change her tire on the side of a busy road in D.C., then America should trust its perfectly sighted visionaries (politicians) to find a way to get the wheels of progress moving again. You can go round, and around, and around all day long, retredding like a tire arguing that comprehensive immigration reform is going to get us nowhere. But, you're not going to go anywhere unless you put all four wheels on the street and pop the car into drive. And if reform means having an extra 12 million folks ready to help push you off, then the wheels of progress are going to have pretty good momentum behind them.
