Dick Morris Goes to Mexico

Dick Morris got an early start in politics, running Jerold Nadler’s campaign for class president of New York City’s Stuyvesent High School. He is best known as an advisor for Bill Clinton’s 1996 campaign, and currently he is a conservative political commentator and strategist. Nicknamed “the snake,” Morris’ resume includes Clinton’s successful 1978 run for Governor of Arkansas as well as work for Trent Lott, Jesse Helms, Pete Wilson, and George W. Bush.

Morris had a low-profile role in Clinton’s 1992 campaign, and was brought back in 1996 to help get him out of his various troubles. Morris came up with the “triangulation” strategy, and has said that getting welfare reform passed was among his proudest achievements. In September of 1996 Time magazine called him “the most influential private citizen in America.”

Within a week of his Time magazine profile, Morris had to leave the Clinton campaign when his ongoing affair with a prostitute was revealed. The relationship was established by the lady in question and by photographs of the two on a hotel balcony. Morris apparently let her listen to calls with Clinton and shared intimate details of his work, and he was reported to have a sexual preference for toe-sucking.

Today, Morris’ activities include promoting Condoleezza Rice as a presidential hopeful and advocating for school choice. He also operates on the international stage, with clients including the anti-EU United Kingdom Independence Party and the Ukraine’s US-backed and privatization-minded Viktor Yushchenko.

_______________________________________________________________

The frontrunners in the July 2nd Mexican presidential election are Felipe Calderon, the conservative free-trader candidate of Fox’s PAN party, and Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (known as AMLO), the soft-leftist former Mexico City mayor and PRD candidate. Calderon is calling for lower taxes, denationalization of the oil industry, and a fiscally conservative approach to government spending. He also opposes abortion rights and quotes the bible during speeches. For two years, AMLO has led in polls, and his victory would be yet another success for left-populism in Latin America. In a recent turn-around, Calderon has taken a small lead, but it must be noted that Mexican polls do not have a reputation for veracity.

Article 33 of the Mexican Constitution says, “Foreigners may not involve themselves in any way in the political affairs of the country,” but that has not stopped Morris from becoming a regular participant in Mexican electoral politics. He has bragged of his work for Vincente Fox, and all indications are that he is deeply involved in the Calderon campaign. Assuming that the new polls are accurate, there is evidence that it is Morris’ advocacy for both negative campaigning and US-style electioneering in general that is responsible for the turnaround. Using focus groups and other paraphernalia of modern “scientific” campaigning, Calderon has branded AMLO as dangerous, intolerant, and ideologically twinned with the unpopular-in-Mexico Hugo Chavez.

Dick Morris’ advocacy for Calderon has not been limited to Mexico. He has written opinion pieces in the US titled "Menace in Mexico" and "Mexico's Hugo Chavez" in which his status as an advisor to Cardenas is conspicuously absent. His words of wisdom have included the claim that, “Lopez Obrador could be the final piece” in a “grand plan to bring the United States to its knees before the newly resurgent Latin left.”

Turning to the subject of migration, AMLO has recognized that it is a bad sign that so many people want to leave his country, and he has called illegal immigration "Mexico's disgrace." In the meantime, Morris has been arguing that any hardline immigration bill will contribute to an AMLO win. He has praised Bush’s recent immigration speech, and he is calling for earned-citizenship (apparently for those already here), a guest worker program (for everybody else), and a wall.


A guest worker program is probably the worst idea out there on the immigration issue. Illegal immigration opponents are unhappy with it because it will both keep wages down and deepen the divide between Mexican nationals in the US and mainstream Americans. Pro-immigrant activists are unhappy with it because it will formalize and worsen a “two-tier system.” We can think of it as the apartheid solution. As a nation we are going to have to come up with a solution to the issue of illegal immigration, and we will need both common practical and moral reasoning and honesty in our debate in order to do this.

For example, we should call amnesty amnesty. To say that people who have lived here for at least two years can stay, and eventually obtain US citizenship, is to grant those people amnesty. And we need to find reasoning that can lead to a consensus. Many on the left feel that since we acquired much of Mexico in war, it is unfair to prohibit Mexicans from crossing the border. But this way of thinking is just too idealistic for the real world. Many others, across the political spectrum, would agree with a recent statement by Tamar Jacoby of the Manhattan Institute that we need immigrants “to grow our economy.”

This logic, that we should excuse law breaking for purely practical reasons, is just too cold and utilitarian to sit opposite the scale from what many or most Americans see as willful and deliberate lawbreaking. Jacoby, in spite of her dubious employer, also offered one of the best articulations for a justification of amnesty: the “wink and a nod” theory, or what the legally-minded might call equitable estoppel. Our government, and by extension all of us, and our business community have in effect conspired to promote illegal immigration. We have chosen not to enforce our immigration laws; since this could be relatively easy through the use of tough anti-hiring laws and tough enforcement, we should probably be “estopped” from now, suddenly, choosing enforcement.

This reasoning does not apply to anyone who comes here during a time of serious enforcement of the law. As this analysis shows, you create a moral mess when you don’t enforce a law. So a relatively simple solution presents itself: super-aggressive enforcement of current law starting tomorrow, and amnesty for those here now. The remaining question would then be how many new immigrants do we want? Since there are seriously-held arguments on both sides of the debate, with some arguing that immigrants lower wages and create more social change than our society can accommodate and some arguing that we have an economic need for more people, it makes sense to keep our current legal immigration quotas and defer any increase in legal migration until it is known how amnesty, a frank social experiment, works out.