Will we carry on the bombers’ work?

Now that Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev is dead and his wounded younger brother, Dzhokhar, 19, is hospitalized in federal prison, awaiting trial and execution or a life of incarceration (assuming he’s guilty, as everyone does, and this isn’t some awful misunderstanding) it’s up to every American to take up the fallen sword and find a way to really hurt the United States.

That, in essence, is what is being said by politicians who make the leap from this specific crime to our nation’s policy on immigration, which after years of dysfunction, finally seemed to be inching toward some kind of relief in the weeks leading up to the blast. Not that they use those words. The smoke had barely cleared before Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) fired off a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), calling on him to put the brakes on immigration reform until the status of the Chechen brothers could be fully investigated.

“We should not proceed until we understand the specific failures of our immigration system,” Paul wrote. “Why did the current system allow two individuals to immigrate to the United States from the Chechen Republic in Russia, an area known as a hotbed of Islamic extremism, who then committed acts of terrorism?”

Most Republicans, to their credit, still back immigration reform. But not all of their leaders have gotten the memo.

Obviously, they aren’t saying, “Let’s keep hamstringing our own country.” But that would be the result if anyone heeded them — always a risk, since the GOP just picked up immigration reform, between a thumb and forefinger, with the scowling disgust of a homeowner lifting something regurgitated by the cat. The sense is reform will continue — even Republicans seem hesitant to fling reform away on such a flimsy pretext. But similar shifts have happened before — their tail of extremism wags the whole dog before it.

It’s ironic. After Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah Building, nobody said, “Hey, let’s put school reform on ice until we figure out how this terrorist came out of Starpoint Central High School.” We didn’t stop releasing movies after the Aurora shooting.

But in the any-logic-so-long-as-the-conclusion-is-we-keep-the-foreigners-out school of thought, just as the perfect is the enemy of the good, so one example serves as an argument. We have to seal the borders before we do anything meaningful about immigration, and every time someone with a Hispanic surname commits a crime, the case for deporting the 11 million immigrants who live in rightless serfdom is conclusively proven.

This mindset defines American conservatism as it sinks deeper into its rump phase. I call it “synecdochical thinking.”— synecdoche, as you may remember from high school English, is a literary trope where an individual or part stands in for the group or whole. When I say, ‘I’m going to get a bite to eat,” what I really mean is “an entire meal,” which the bite represents. In literature, it can add zest. “Two Years Before the Mast” sounds a lot better than “Two Years Aboard a Ship.”

We see it continually online. Some isolated episode — one teacher makes an unwise call at a school somewhere, one government scientist probes into an area that, at first blush, might not seem the most productive use of federal research dollars. And the howl goes up — this is where the liberals want to take our country, that is what the Obama administration thinks is important to fund. You replying by pointing out that an example isn’t proof. They just stare at you. Huh?

The truth — not the synecdochical truth, or the through-the-tears-of-Boston truth, but the true truth, true today and true last year and 100 years ago, is this: We are a nation built on immigrants. The immigrants, though bringing challenges, conquer those challenges with the energy and work and culture and success they also bring. Each new wave that came in — the Irish, the Italians, the Jews — were met by those already here rending their garments and howling that America is full, that this new version of their grandparents is some unacceptable, unassimilated menace that must be repulsed lest the nation be ruined. This process cycles repeatedly with scant intrusion of any historical awareness.

The current cycle — Hispanic immigrants this time, primarily from Mexico — is so far along that only one thing is going to happen — they are going to become citizens, and take their place in the Americans story. No fence is tall enough to change that, and we wouldn’t want it to, because if you set aside xenophobia, you see that immigrants are saving American from the demographic death spiral facing Japan and Italy and half a dozen other Western countries. We invited them, we need them, and we’ve been really bad hosts. No bombing changes that, and anyone who thinks it might have are fools. Of course, they were fools before, and no blast is strong enough to shake some sense into them.