The recent GOP debate brought the term “smashmouth” out of the NFL and onto the GOP presidential playing field as front running Romney and Guilianni wallowed in the mud over the GOP signature issue of immigration.  It was genuinely humbling to watch them eat their own to gain an upper hand the issue.  I’d love every one of them to eat their “Freedom Fries” with some French Immigration Policy simply to watch them swallow that pill and explain the American economical equivalent of doing so. 

By the early 1990s, even though immigration in all categories of legal entries had fallen, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s extreme-right National Front party was attracting a significant portion of the electorate with its demagogic demand to expel Muslim immigrants from France. Politicians across the political spectrum responded by arguing in favor of “immigration zéro,” and the right-wing coalition that came into power in 1993 translated the principle of zero immigration into policy. The “Pasqua law” of 1993, named after French interior minister Charles Pasqua, sought to stem the remaining legal flows in a variety of ways: by prohibiting foreign graduates from accepting job offers by French employers and denying them a stable residence status, by increasing the waiting period for family reunification from one to two years, and by denying residency permits to foreign spouses who had been illegally in the country prior to marrying.

These repressive measures rendered formerly legal migration flows illegal. Thus today, in spite of a partial regularization of undocumented aliens in 1997, there are still many people living in France known as inexpulsables-irrégularisables. This group—including rejected asylum-seekers from countries to which it is not safe to return, and foreign parents of French children—cannot be expelled, yet is not eligible for residency permits. They epitomize the contradictions of liberal democracies in the face of migration pressure, caught between respecting the human rights and norms embedded in domestic and international law, and an electoral logic that leads politicians to adopt a restrictive stance towards immigration.

Meanwhile, Rudy and Mitt were arguing semantics instead. 

I’m certainly not implying the French have it right. But most of the GOP playing field doesn’t even look at the “human capital” aspect of immigration from the bottom up.  Instead, these guys (and far too many of the electorate for that matter) are approaching immigration from an emotional and often racist perspective. And the dust up between Rudy and Mitt illustrates that they completely lack the ability to address the issue intellectually from both the economic or humanitarian fronts with their electoral logic.

So did the pig win? Well, they both got muddy so I guess they are both pigs.