Your Boy Tom Cotton, increasingly Trumpified and plainly ambitious and opportunistic, has squeezed himself Houdini-like to The Donald's microscopic right on immigration.
Cotton has put in a bill with U.S. Sen. David Perdue of Georgia to bar all these extended family members of legal immigrants from coming into the United States. Yes, legal, not illegal.
Cotton has moved toward and even beyond Trumpian populism. He has moved away from business groups like the Club for Growth and Koch brothers' organizations that favor Latino workers as a boon to the domestic economy, and to whom he owes his early political success.
The White House hasn't yet embraced the measure, owing to its obsession with keeping out illegal immigrants, war-ravaged refugees and Muslims. But Cotton says he and his new best friend the president have chatted amiably about his bill.
Cotton went on white-supremacy radio last week--the Breitbart News satellite site--to say he was sponsoring the bill in behalf of the good people of his beloved home state who have high school educations or less and have seen their wages drop because of the flood of cheap legal immigrant labor.
His professed theory goes as follows: If a legal immigrant settles in Arkansas with a wife and kids and a green card, that's all right. But if he gets his parents and adult kids and siblings and their kids in on his green card--as is now possible--then Arkansas residents lacking in education and job skills will make less money because competition from the extended immigrant family will drive down their pay.
His bill would let a green card-holder get only his parents into the country, beyond his wife and kids, and then only if his parents were certifiably ill and he was their only caregiver.
Cotton says his bill would reduce the annual legal immigration population by half.
The policy debate is worthy. Does the current rate of legal immigration help fuel a growing economy, as chamber-of-commerce Republicans will tell you? Or does it allow unskilled work to get done more cheaply and thus drive down wages for the least-skilled among Americans?
It perhaps does both, since policy truth does not always conform nicely to a neo-Trumpian's expedient political posturing.
The issue fits neatly into my construction that Trumpism makes scaredy-cats of our erstwhile land of the free, home of the brave and beacon of freedom and opportunity to the world.
Trumpism is fearful of any humanitarian aid to outsiders lest a terrorist sneak in. Now Cottonism is fearful even of green card-holders because the least-skilled native-born among us can't be expected to better their condition if in competition with legal immigrants.
The Trump-Cotton America draws the blinds, cowers behind the couch and won't answer the door.
The previous Republican gospel--that we all must take responsibility for ourselves and not depend on the government--seems to apply by the Trump-Cotton philosophy only to welfare programs, not to government banning of immigrant labor.
Cotton and allies will say the difference is that they are protecting the working poor from outsiders, not rewarding the welfare poor for driving their flashy SUVs to the grocery store for steak they secure with food stamps.
I invoke not reality, but a Cotton-concocted campaign image.
If our highest aspiration for low-income Americans is that they get paid more for cleaning a motel room than an excluded niece of a green-card holder, then perhaps America aims too low for her working poor.
Anyway, most economists will tell you the decline in low-end wages in America is mostly a result of an economy that is globalizing and mechanizing and otherwise transforming, and perhaps only marginally attributable to cheap immigrant labor.
What isn't much at question is the Trump-Cotton political "bromance."
Cotton spoke last week to the American Enterprise Institute and ridiculed the media by saying "our system can withstand the shock of a Republican presidency, even if the media can't." He dismissed critics of Trump's tweeting who say it foments international chaos by saying, "I hate to break this to you: The world already is in chaos," a condition he blamed on Barack Obama's actions, not Trump's words.
In that speech, Cotton said Trump had brought Andrew Jackson's anti-elitism to the Oval Office at the very time Jackson's Democratic Party was abandoning him. And he extolled a "healthy nationalism."
Cotton has made himself into the new Jeff Sessions, first among Republican senators to embrace Trump's outsider candidacy. Our new attorney general was, until the other day, a blustery right-wing senator from Alabama drawling against the rate of legal, not illegal, immigration.
After this three-week eternity of the Trump presidency, much of the country is already looking forward to the day when there is a different president.
Tom Cotton personifies the wisdom in the adage to be careful what you wish for.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 02/14/2017