All the contradictions and complexities in our nation’s immigration policy are now being openly uncovered in the present contretemps between California gubernatorial candidate Megabites Whitman and her former housekeeper, who under your own accord uncovered herself now being an illegal immigrant.

Opponents of immigration – including Whitman – tend to discuss immigration enforcement in shrill, impersonal terms: Take Whitman’s promise to become “tough as nails” on immigration policy. However in Whitman’s situation as with others, the rhetoric and also the reality are far apart.

Provide simple facts associated with a immigration debate and also you discover the complex lives of individuals: immigrants who form relationships using their employers, their spouses and kids, immigrants who are members of communities, who can’t be expunged from your lives using the wave from the Border Patrol’s wand.

“I wasn’t will make a good example of Nicky,” Whitman stated in explaining her desire not to hasten the deportation / removal of her former housekeeper by calling the government bodies. The housekeeper, she stated, was a part of her “relatives.”

That’s in which the true difficulty in enforcing immigration policy lies: how can you separate families and communities in order to cleanse the nation of illegal immigrants? For me, the reply is you cannot. The cost of eliminating illegal immigrants is simply too high, not only on their own lives, but on their own families and communities.

Immigration opponents happen to be calling Whitman a hypocrite. To be sure that she’s hypocritical for supporting a attack on illegal immigrant employers while attempting to hide her very own, possibly accidental, employment of 1. But in my experience those things of her and her husband in attempting to steer clear of the potential immigration pitfalls of her housekeeper, even if they’ve already suspected something was wrong, aren’t hypocritical. They’re human.

You can easily be anti-immigrant within the abstract. It’s more difficult when that immigrant is the friend, your partner, when it’s the gardener, the butcher, the housekeeper, the caregiver that you simply depend on. This imbroglio, for those its political implications reveals the messiness of hr that’s in the centre associated with a discussion of immigration.