Jim Farmer retweetledi
Hello Representative Salazar,
You probably don't even know this... but he word "dignity" in your bill's title carries decades of political science literature behind it.
Dignity shifted from something that originates within the individual to something engineered from above by institutions. When the UN, NGOs, and multilateral bodies invoke dignity, they mean the replacement of organic, inherited civic bonds with managed, contractual ones administered by a professional class. That is the tradition your bill's language is drawing from, whether you intend it or not.
On the substance: the DIGNITY Act is amnesty. Symbolic barriers to permanent residency do not change that the bill provides a path to legal status for tens of millions of people who entered the country unlawfully. Others have dissected the policy details thoroughly, so I won't repeat their work here.
But I want to press a different question. Why the insistence that this isn't amnesty? The most straightforward explanation is that you know your constituents oppose it. They voted for enforcement, in the most demographically diverse Republican coalition in modern history. That coalition didn't ask for managed integration. It asked for sovereignty.
The Founding Fathers built a republic from the bottom up, starting with human nature as it actually is: rooted in specific communities. The rules-based international order builds from the top down, starting with an abstract ideal and engineering populations to match it. Your bill, whatever its intentions, belongs to the second tradition, the one that is non-American. It assumes that cohesion can be manufactured through NGO programs... public schools, civic integration, managed assimilation... rather than protected through enforcement of the boundaries that a self-governing people chose to establish.
That is not a conservative position. It is not a republican position in any meaningful sense.
And your constituents can see it.
We see you.
You are a fraud, Representative Salazar.
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