As I write, President Obama is speaking about immigration. His opening to this hot topic was seemingly cold-hearted: he focused on the economic reasons for immigration reform – to keep skilled immigrants, to stop employers from having to compete with ones that hire undocumented workers and exploit them, to get the new jobs and new industries that immigrants may build. It sounded very Republican in focus, in short.
Now President Obama has moved on to the kinds of justifications that we would have expected: re-uniting families, opening opportunities, sparing people the fear and exploitation of the shadow economy. He’s telling the wonderful human stories behind immigration (a young man who was the first to benefit from the Dreamer executive order and is now in college, preparing for the Air Force).
This is a powerful example of something called “consilience,” the property of being the right course of action for multiple reasons. In this speech President Obama laid out the very diverse reasons for immigration reform. In doing so, he is giving Republicans the tools to sell it to their supporters and Democrats a different set of tools for theirs. Is one set of reasons the “real” set? No, there really are multiple, different reasons for reform. It’s lovely to have an adult for President who can see so many of them.
5 comments