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"  In the early years of the last century, my grandfather decided that it was time to cut bait. His parents were bound and determined to make a priest out of him, so, for a couple of years, they packed him off daily to a seminary school in Tralee. My grandfather was having none of it. Family legend has it that he would take the bus every day from Kilflynn, the little hilltop village in north Kerry in which he lived, and sit all day in the station in Tralee, before dutifully coming home. However, time was fast approaching when he&amp;#039;d have to enter the seminary for keeps. Instead, a cousin living in Worcester, in central Massachusetts, wrote him a letter saying that, if my grandfather came over, he could get a job on the city, either in the fire department or with the Worcester P.D. My grandfather caught something close to the first thing smoking. He met and married my grandmother, who also had left north Kerry, because she wanted to be a shepherd even less than my grandfather wanted to be a priest. He had his badge within a year or so, and his detective&amp;#039;s shield a few years after that. And that is how we all became Americans. I mention this only because how people become Americans is at the top of the news again. The Supreme Court seems poised to give its strong approval to at least part of a draconian Arizona law that would turn every cop in every small town into a de facto border agent. Once that happens, laws like the one in Arizona are likely to come roaring out of a number of state legislatures around the country, and everyone in those state who looks like someone&amp;#039;s idea of an undocumented immigrant will be, in the eyes of the law, at least partly criminalized. At the same time this is going on, Senator Marco Rubio, who, almost everyone believes, is a huge part of the future of the Republican party, and who also looks like he&amp;#039;s about twelve, is trying to pick his way through a minefield of his and his party&amp;#039;s own making. He is trying to explain how he became an American, and the process he&amp;#039;d like to create whereby other people could become Americans. This is mainly because we just watched a primary season in which the Republican candidates fought like angry spaniels over which of them would be tougher on the undocumented, and in which the putative nominee Willard Romney said we should get so crazy-tough that the people in question would &amp;quot;self-deport,&amp;quot; a remark he&amp;#039;s still trying in his own butter-tongued way to explain. (Hey, if the man feels up to trimming his own hedges these days, who am I to say no? ) Rubio can read a poll, and he saw that the party to which he&amp;#039;d hitched his future was becoming rather unpopular among Hispanic voters. This boded well neither for the upcoming election, or for the sales of Rubio&amp;#039;s new autobiography. Rubio&amp;#039;s official biography already had caused him some trouble. He got caught out fudging the reasons why his parents came to America. He had spent his career implying that they had fled the oppression that they saw coming after Fidel Castro came to power. It turned out that they&amp;#039;d left, probably for purely economic reasons. Which would be perfectly fine, except that becoming an American by being an anti-Castro exile is a point of pride in the community in which Rubio was raised. (It&amp;#039;s not an altogether different story from that boasted about by some Irish immigrants, who left Ireland after fighting, and failing, in one of the innumerable attempts to boot the British. The similarities extend right down to the involvement of those immigrants here to arm and finance further attempts at rebellion in the old country.) The dust-up over why his parents left Cuba was the very first dent in what had been Rubio&amp;#039;s almost flawless political armor. Then, this week, watching the polling gap among Hispanics turn into a yawning abyss, Rubio decided to throw long. He proposed his own version of the DREAM Act, the long-delayed Democratic plan to offer the children of the undocumented a &amp;quot;path to citizenship.&amp;quot; This is regularly derided on Rubio&amp;#039;s side of the aisle as &amp;quot;amnesty.&amp;quot; (In the primaries, Newt Gingrich said he could support only that part of it that would allow the children of the undocumented citizenship as a reward for enlisting in the armed forces. Rick Santorum rejected even that as &amp;quot;amnesty.&amp;quot;) Rubio&amp;#039;s proposal essentially splits the Democratic law in two. It would make Americans out of certain very young children, and it would grant non-immigrant visas to older children so that they could stay in the country in order to go to college and/or join the military. The law, which Rubio has yet to draft, was seen as the first real attempt at chipping away at the huge lead the president had amassed among Hispanic voters. The idea, of course, was dead on arrival. Speaker John Boehner already has said Rubio&amp;#039;s bill won&amp;#039;t pass the House. Romney went to Warp Factor Five in order to self-deport his support. (Romney&amp;#039;s former adviser on immigration issues, Kris Kobach, the creator of the Arizona law, went further, actually calling the bill &amp;quot;amnesty.&amp;quot; The Romney campaign has since bravely distanced itself from Kobach, whom it does not need any more.) And the Democrats just as quickly moved to note the obvious political ramifications of Rubio&amp;#039;s plan. Richard Carmona, who&amp;#039;s running for the soon-to-be-even-more-vacant Senate seat in Arizona presently held by John Kyl, was particularly unimpressed: &amp;quot;Why do you think they&amp;#039;re reworking their initial vitriolic, far-right, &amp;#039;deport everybody&amp;#039; (message)?&amp;quot; he asked. &amp;quot;Why? Do you think that all of a sudden there&amp;#039;s an epiphany and their hearts have opened up to people who are struggling? I don&amp;#039;t think so. I think it&amp;#039;s a political calculation \u2014 that they recognized they cannot win their races and stay in office unless they embrace the Hispanic community. So, I really feel it&amp;#039;s very disingenuous.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s hard not to give Rubio a little credit here for at least bowing to the political reality the the virulent anti-immigrant demagoguery that passes for policy within the Republican &amp;quot;base&amp;quot; might just be something of a ball-and-chain going forward in a country that is increasingly younger and less white than it used to be. (Two demographic trends that pretty much account for the very existence of that Republican &amp;quot;base&amp;quot; in the first place.) He stuck his neck out just a little in doing so and, while I agree that his alternative to the DREAM Act is pretty small beer, it gave the Republicans a chance to spend a couple of days not looking quite so much like a terrarium for old white people. None of us really know how to become Americans any more. It&amp;#039;s always been a struggle against nativism and bigotry. The Irish had it tough for a short while, but then Maureen, the downstairs maid, started sparking with Trey Wellington Winthrop IV and, suddenly, there were Catholics in the family, mater. But the Eastern Europeans, with their strange political ideas and (in many cases) their Jewishness, had a tougher road. There was a strict quota on Asian immigrants for years \u2014 enforced through some of the same nasty rhetoric we see today \u2014 but enough Japanese had settled here and become citizens that locking them up and stealing their property at the beginning of World War II was a very profitable business. People became Americans until the country&amp;#039;s politics decided they weren&amp;#039;t. But, now, it&amp;#039;s the Southeast Asians and, especially, Hispanic immigrants who are facing all that and more, because the worst part of assimilation is the amnesia it causes among the descendants of the assimilated. To me, you become an American when you acknowledge within yourself that the country doesn&amp;#039;t belong to you. That it is something held in common by the Italian butcher, and the French-Canadian mechanic, and the Irish cop from a parish different from yours. That it is something that will be held in common by the Cambodian store owner and the Salvadoran kid whose parents went through the hell at the border to get him here, and who grew up and became a Marine, and who now works stocking shelves for the Cambodian guy while he waits for the country he served to get around to deciding if there is a piece of it he can have. You become an American, finally, when you admit there are other Americans, and that these Americans build their own personal Americas of the mind and of the heart, and that they do it through what they brought here from countries far away. This is what should animate the political debate we are having over immigration: the common acknowledgement that people other than ourselves always have had a purchase on the country&amp;#039;s promise and, if the country bucked and pulled and resisted them, sooner or later, it would return to its senses and grudgingly, demanding work on both sides, give up enough of itself to admit the new Americans over the sometimes noxious objections of the old. My grandfather came here because he didn&amp;#039;t want to be a priest. My grandmother came here because being a domestic worker looked like a better deal than tending the flocks on the hills outside Listowel. Today, there are people coming here because trimming the Romney hedges looks like a better deal than living amid the drug violence in Sinaloa, or scratching out a living farming a pock-marked hillside in El Salvador. We must have a policy on this issue and it has to make sense. But first, the rest of us have to admit something that the old WASP establishment and the Nativist mobs were forced to admit long ago. America belongs to nobody and it belongs to everybody. Admit that, and you&amp;#039;ve become an American. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a13826/marco-rubio-dream-act-8409861/?hootPostID=9dbe0e39c96073ce1489405589766c22>