I’m trying to finish a longer post on Rand Paul’s amnesty speech, but I couldn’t resist after reading Katrina’s post below. Senator Paul doesn’t like the language used to describe amnesty:
“The immigration debate has been trapped and it’s been polarized by two terms: ‘path to citizenship’ and ‘amnesty,’” Paul told reporters in a conference call this afternoon. “So everybody who doesn’t want anything to move forward calls every proposal that somebody else wants ‘pathway to citizenship’ or ‘you’re granting amnesty.’ Can’t we have reform and just not call them by names that discourage the progress from going forward?”
This is hilarious. “Path to citizenship” is itself a euphemism, one of many dreamed up to avoid the A-word, in the wake of focus groups conducted in 2001 by the National Council of La Raza to advise the Mexican government on how to push amnesty. The fact that they need to keep dreaming up new euphemisms once everyone understands what the old ones stand for should be a sign that the underlying policy is the problem, not the labels attached to it.