07/25/2008
I don’t know who coined the maddening phrase "path to citizenship," but it’s safe to say it wasn’t a friend of immigration restriction. I've heard it from pro-amnesty Republicans like Bush and McCain and from any number of Democrats, but more frustratingly, from the press.A big recent example is the July 13, 2008 front-pager in The New York Times about John McCain’s "conservative model," Teddy Roosevelt. Here it is,[McCain’s Conservative Model? Roosevelt (Theodore, That Is) — NYTimes.com] slipped in at the end of the fifth paragraph after "tackling global warning" (which reporters Adam Nagourney and Michael Cooper describe as "centrist" objectives). Hard to imagine a New York Times editor asking, "But wait a minute … aren’t we just adopting the phraseology of open-borders partisans by using this term?"
A Google news search shows "path to citizenship" pops up every few hours in the press, almost always sans quotation marks.
The "path" part is what gets me — it conjures a rose-lined, yellow-brick lane, fit for girls in pinafore dresses to skip down while licking lollipops. Only good things happen on "paths." With this picturesque "path," we can photoshop out the outlandish illegality that started the whole process.
But the actual "path" trod by illegal aliens is beaten from grass into dust and lined with empty Tecate cans. And it doesn’t end in a pretty garden. It ends in a Third-World America. Can we get Adam Nagourney and Michael Cooper to paint that picture?
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.