Dean Minnich: Wait until politicians start swapping inmates for immigrants | COMMENTARY

Politics can be gritty, but this silly game of Republican governors from border states sending immigrants to northern states run by Democrats is childish.

Maybe that’s unfair to children.

Let’s test the idea that you can put a group of preschoolers in the same room and have more collegiality than you have in Congress or between adults from the fringes of their politics.

I’d bet the kids have more fun, and probably get more done at the same time. If there is a disagreement, there are adults around who restore order and get back to basic rules of civility. No hitting each other with Legos.

If the current trends continue with the division between conservatives and liberals, someone will escalate the swap wars; some northern governor will pardon prison inmates and send busloads of them to Florida and Texas for a fresh start.

Who can complain? Instead of incarcerating American citizens at a rate that leads the world, send them to a state where everyone is on their own. They can find success in the free-wheeling economies that attract entrepreneurs and risk-takers who believe in making their own way in the world.

Sure, there will be those who oppose opening their doors to convicted thieves, grifters, liars, womanizers and self-serving power seekers, even though an awful lot of people are willing to elect them to political offices.

But at least not all the pardoned inmates arriving by bus in Republican country will be politicians. Some of them will be people whose jobs were sent to cheaper wage areas in the South. And they won’t be coming by way of the border, which will calm down some of the electorate. Maybe.

Obviously, for those who think satire is a perfume, I am having fun with this, but I recognize the seriousness of the immigration problem. This country must do something to secure the borders. All of them — South, North, both coasts.

Busing immigrants from Texas or Florida to New York or Martha’s Vineyard is a darker joke than my scenario with inmate swaps.

The refusal to grant funding for Ukraine is linked to the issue of border controls only because a Democrat is in the White House. Republicans are willing to abandon an American commitment to not only Ukraine, but ties to NATO and world peace because the border debacle is now owned by Joe Biden and the Democratic party.

Enough Republicans are tired of the support to Ukraine to make it easy to refuse to fund it a “win” for the GOP. The border issues go back many years, through both Republican and Democratic administrations.

The fact that it has remained a problem is an indictment of the flaws of partisanship over partnership in running our nation’s business. Neither Republicans nor Democrats can take pride in the fact that we would rather stoke the anger of the electorate than admit that walls and separating families and sending people to intern camps — or busing them to other parts of the country — will not solve the problem of a river of humanity wanting opportunities to stay alive and work and be Americans.

We can’t send everybody back to their roots. If we turned back the clock to do that, we’d have had no one to work in the mines, steel mills, factories, farms (and plantations), and, to put a point on it, almost none of us would be here, because our ancestors would not have met and had babies.

Right?

Dean Minnich writes from Westminster.