Should-Read: Will Wilkinson: The DACA and immigration debates are about whether Latinos are “real Americans”

Should-Read: Will Wilkinson: The DACA and immigration debates are about whether Latinos are “real Americans”: “Challenging the idea that Latino Americans can be truly American undercuts the very idea of America…

…The fact that there’s any question about affording legal status to a class of rooted young immigrants who grew up American among Americans is shameful. It’s a reflection of the disgraceful fact that so many of us are doggedly ignorant of the country we claim to revere, and deny the plain historical truth that America has always been multicultural…. It makes no more sense, culturally or ethnically, to call into question the Americanness of a young woman whose mom brought her from Hermosillo to Tucson at the age of 6 than it does to doubt that a white guy raised in Syracuse but born in Toronto can ever really belong there. Threatening to hang DREAMers out to dry—to arrest them, to uproot them, to jail them, to rip them from their families, to sever their bonds of loyalty and love, and to cast them into exile—threatens the equality and security of tens of millions of American citizens who are ethnically and culturally identical to them. And a threat to any subset of Americans is a threat to America—to us.

Trump’s unilateral act of political hostage-taking was, from the beginning, an act of violent division, an assault on the integrity of the actual, existing, real-world American people. The ethnically purified fantasy of the populist imagination is a seditious force that obscures our higher loyalties, shatters the peace of liberal equality, and splits Americans into warring tribes ready to abuse people whom patriotic decency would otherwise compel us to defend…