Columns

When it comes to immigration, conservatives find it hard to multitask. Once they start talking, they stop thinking.

They love soundbites and simple solutions. And they don’t believe in letting a good catchphrase go to waste.

It used to be that those on the right would bash opponents on the pro-immigrant side by accusing them of supporting “amnesty” or creating “sanctuary cities.”

Conservatives were not deterred in the least by the fact that no one in Congress has called for an unconditional amnesty for undocumented immigrants since the 1980s. And, point of fact, back then the folks who were most likely to propose that course of action were pro-business Republicans like Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Nor were they particularly troubled by the reality that there is no such thing as a sanctuary city, meaning there is no municipality on the map where immigration law doesn’t apply and where U.S. immigration agents give the undocumented a “Get Out of Jail Free” card. The proof lies in the fact that the federal government can steamroll into any so-called sanctuary city at will.

Some sanctuary.

Now conservatives insist that anyone who questions the tactics of U.S. Border Patrol agents, or suggests that Immigration and Customs Enforcement be abolished, or worries about the welfare of immigrant families separated at the border, or advocates for Dreamers must be in favor of “open borders.”

That is the catchphrase du jour.

Among those who fancy it is President Trump who last month told a campaign rally in South Carolina: “The Democrats want open borders. They want anybody they wanted, including MS-13, pouring into the country.”

A few days later, Trump tweeted: “HOUSE REPUBLICANS SHOULD PASS THE STRONG BUT FAIR IMMIGRATION BILL… WE WANT STRONG BORDERS & SECURITY WHILE THE DEMS WANT OPEN BORDERS = CRIME. WIN!”

Other Republicans have suggested for years that Democrats push for open borders because they want an unlimited number of immigrants from Mexico and Central America that they can turn into Democratic voters.

And once again, conservatives don’t have a clue about what is really going on in the immigration debate. In this case, they are just plain wrong about how there is supposedly this huge clamor for open borders — in media, politics, business, clergy, or anywhere else.

And Democrats? They’re the last people on Earth to advocate for open borders. That’s the farthest thing from their minds. They’re so traumatized by the experience of having been labeled soft on the Vietnam War in the 1970s, soft on national security in the 1980s, and soft on crime in the 1990s that they are not about to let themselves be labeled soft on illegal immigration today.

In fact, Democrats tend to overcompensate by throwing money at the U.S.-Mexico border. In the last 30 years, Democrats have voted to fund the hiring of more border patrol agents, more walls and fencing, more electronic sensors and drones and just about every other enforcement measure you could name.

This point is not lost on Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who a few weeks ago tweeted: “Open borders, @realDonaldTrump? The bipartisan immigration bill I authored had $40 billion for border security and would have been far more effective than the wall.”

That would be the Trump Wall, as opposed to the wall and fencing that 26 Senate Democrats — including Schumer, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Dianne Feinstein, and Barbara Boxer — authorized building by supporting the Secure Fence Act of 2006.

Besides, how open is the U.S.-Mexico border? The very claim is often based on the fact that people still come across illegally.

So what? That will always happen. Desperate and determined people will always find a way to go under, over, or around any barrier that stands between them and the possibility of feeding their families. Ingenious smugglers can be counted on to build better mousetraps and try to get past whatever obstacle U.S. officials put in their way — and to use any attempts to fortify the border as an excuse to raise prices.

That is human nature. And the fact that law enforcement or federal officials or the U.S. government can’t change human nature—– anymore than they can change the weather or stop the flow of a river — doesn’t mean the United States isn’t doing a good job of securing the border and thwarting most attempts to breach it.

The Department of Homeland Security has an annual budget of $40.6 billion dollars, of which $7.6 billion goes to ICE and $13.56 billion goes to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

The fact is, from San Diego to Brownsville, the U.S.-Mexico border has never been more secure. Anyone who says otherwise has probably never taken the time to visit and see it up-close.

So why should we take them — or anything they say — seriously?

Ruben Navarrette, a contributing editor to Angelus News, is a syndicated columnist with The Washington Post Writers Group, a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors, a Daily Beast columnist, author of “A Darker Shade of Crimson: Odyssey of a Harvard Chicano,” and host of the podcast “Navarrette Nation.”

SAN DIEGO — The Trump administration is taking the right stance in opposing race-conscious admissions policies in education.

But it is doing so for the wrong reason. President Trump and Co. want to end what conservatives call “reverse discrimination” against what they consider to be a poor beleaguered class of victims: white males.

Trump owes his presidency to white people, and he takes care of his peeps. And if you’re a Trump voter and your life didn’t turn out to be a rose garden, why not blame minorities? Beats going to night school.

White males are doing fine. They no longer devour the whole pie, but they still get most of it.

Meanwhile, the best argument for ending race-conscious policies rarely gets made. Before I make it, let’s look at how we got here.

In 1961, President Kennedy signed Executive Order 10925, which established the concept of affirmative action by ordering that projects financed by federal funds “take affirmative action” to make sure that hiring and employment were free of racial bias.

In 1978, in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the Supreme Court ruled that 38-year-old white male Allan Bakke be admitted to the medical school at the University of California, Davis. Bakke had been rejected, he claimed, because of a set-aside for minorities. But a majority of the justices also found it permissible for a college or university to consider race or ethnicity among other factors.

In 2011, the Obama administration urged elementary and secondary schools, as well as universities, to achieve diversity by taking students’ race into account in a “narrowly tailored manner.”

Now the Trump administration is pushing educational institutions to use “race-neutral methods” for assigning students to elementary and secondary schools and admitting students to colleges and universities.

In a joint letter, the Education and Justice departments announced that they had revoked seven Obama-era policy guidelines on affirmative action. The Trump administration claims the guidelines “advocate policy preferences and positions beyond the requirements of the Constitution.”

Don’t be surprised if before long, lawyers for the Trump Justice Department are arguing before the Supreme Court in favor of race-blind admissions.

That puts new emphasis on the upcoming confirmation hearings for Trump’s pick for the high court. U.S. Appeals Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh has said this:

“The Supreme Court has decided many cases on affirmative-action programs and, if confirmed, I would faithfully follow those precedents.”

Following precedent brings us to two cases that the Supreme Court decided in 2003 involving the University of Michigan.

In a case about undergraduate admissions, Gratz vs. Bollinger, the justices ruled that the school erred in separating the applications of minorities and whites — and awarding points to minorities.

Yet, in the case involving the law school, Grutter vs. Bollinger, the justices upheld the law school’s attempt to achieve diversity on campus, which they considered more benign and not an unlawful quota.

This is foremost a clash between fairness and opportunity. Opponents of affirmative action say it is unfair to discriminate against white males. Supporters insist that rolling back race-conscious admissions limits opportunities for African-Americans and Latinos.

We’ve had this argument for decades. It gets us all worked up, but it doesn’t really get us anywhere.

In fact, the very way we argue about affirmative action is outdated.

Talk about how white men can’t catch a break, and African-Americans and Latinos are going to roll their eyes right out of their heads. Discrimination against nonwhites persists.

It’s time for new language. Something along these lines:

The Trump administration is half-right. Someone is getting hurt by affirmative action, but it’s not white males. Rather, it’s the program’s intended beneficiaries — African-Americans and Latinos.

When practiced aggressively, affirmative action often lowers academic standards, stigmatizes recipients as undeserving, and papers over inequality at the crucial K-12 level caused by low expectations.

It also allows well-to-do minorities who have suffered little or no racial hardship to benefit while the truly needy are overlooked. In this way, it promotes elitism within communities of color by allowing into privileged spaces a select group of favored Latinos and African-Americans who hog all the benefits for themselves.

All the while, most folks in these communities are shortchanged by mediocre and underperforming public schools and will thus never be in a position to take advantage of one of these race-conscious programs.

Affirmative action is nearly 60 years old. As it approaches its golden years, it’s time we retire it.

SAN DIEGO — A columnist should always admit when he is wrong, but not enough of us are willing to go to confession.

Thankfully, I’m a happily married man with a wife who is more than happy to point out when I’m wrong. And she does a lot of pointing.

Let me confess: I was wrong. For most of my life, I’ve assumed that diversity would lead automatically to empathy.

Seeing how the Obama and Trump administrations both handled damage control when they mangled immigration policy taught me otherwise.

I used to think — naively — that if you put a racial, ethnic or religious minority in a prestigious post, it would make the organization more sensitive to the plight of the less fortunate.

Alex Azar disproves the theory. The Health and Human Services Secretary is charged with putting back together what the Department of Homeland Security broke into itty bitty pieces.

Azar clearly stinks at his job. We know this because so many parents remain separated from their children, and many others have been deported back to their home countries while their children remain on this side of the border in the custody of the Trump administration.

Uncle Sam is not perfect, but who pegged him for a kidnapper?

Azar recently told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that his department should be credited with “one of the great acts of American generosity and charity, what we are doing for these unaccompanied kids who are smuggled into our country or come across illegally.”

Yes, because there is no greater expression of generosity and charity than separating children from their parents — and then failing to reunite them for several weeks or not at all.

It’s not even clear that Trump and Co. have the faintest idea how many children have been taken from their parents. Some estimates are as high as 3,000.

“These kids are happy, they are loved, they are cared for, it is a compassionate environment,” Azar insisted.

Happy, loved and cared for? Seriously? In other words, he is saying that HHS is doing a fine job of acting as a surrogate parent to children who were separated from their real parents. A more “compassionate” approach would have been to not snatch them in the first place.

Azar’s parents must be quite proud. His father, a retired ophthalmologist, is of Middle Eastern descent. His grandfather emigrated to the United States from Lebanon — the kind of place that Donald Trump would label a “shithole.”

This Trump official has lived the American Dream, attending Dartmouth College and Yale Law School and racking up a net worth of at least $8.7 million as a high-level drug company executive before being named HHS Secretary.

We’ve seen this phenomenon before. Cecilia Munoz — the daughter of Bolivian immigrants, the highest-ranking Latina in the Obama White House as Director of Intergovernmental Affairs, and the administration’s top apologist — defended her boss’s efforts to separate immigrant families. Munoz told PBS: “Even if the law is executed with perfection, there will be parents separated from their children.”

What went wrong? The search for diversity used to produce results that were less embarrassing.

Consider the case of Henry Morgenthau, who served as Treasury Secretary under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Historians record that Morgenthau — who was Jewish — did not go along with the isolationist wave that followed World War I. Nor was he one of those Americans who, in the mid-1930’s, was in denial about the ghastly reports coming out of Europe. Morgenthau was an early advocate for U.S. involvement in the military conflict across the Atlantic that would grow into World War II, and he advised Roosevelt to join the fight.

FDR didn’t heed that advice. The United States didn’t wind up at war with Germany until after our country was attacked at Pearl Harbor. When the U.S. declared war on Japan, Germany — in solidarity with its Axis partner — declared war on the U.S.

The first Nuremberg Laws — which were aimed at eliminating the rights of Jews living in Germany, and marginalizing that population — were passed by the Reichstag in September 1935.

It wasn’t until 1945 — 10 years later, at the end of the war — that Roosevelt’s successor, President Harry Truman, signed an executive order allowing greater numbers of Jewish refugees to enter the United States.

Still, Morgenthau kept the faith. He was fortunate enough to have been given a seat at the table, and he used it to do the right thing.

Other trailblazers who followed came up short.

Ruben Navarrette’s email address is ruben@rubennavarrette.com. His daily podcast, “Navarrette Nation,” is available through every podcast app.

(c) 2018, The Washington Post Writers Group

SAN DIEGO — Judging Supreme Court nominees is tricky. Whether the assessment is taking place formally by lawmakers in the Senate Judiciary Committee, or informally by everyday Americans at water coolers across the country, there are many unknowns.

Whenever there is a Supreme Court vacancy, Americans waste a lot of emotion speculating about whether a nominee would be a good fit. Then Washington-based special-interest groups tap into that emotion to raise money from the true believers. A cause becomes a racket.

But, in reality, we don’t know what’s going to happen if a person is confirmed. It’s a gamble either way.

So, when assessing Supreme Court nominees, I have my own test. And it is based on just one thing: character. That’s what I look for, and — in this process, as in life — it’s the only thing that matters.

Judging from his remarks at the White House last week when his nomination was announced, federal appeals court Judge Brett Kavanaugh has buckets of character. He radiates it.

Where did the 53-year-old get all this character?

Maybe it was from his religion and his Catholic upbringing; the former altar boy was schooled by Jesuits and now volunteers serving meals to the homeless through Catholic Charities.

Maybe it was from the hard work and dedication that Kavanaugh obviously poured into a top-flight education at Georgetown Preparatory School, Yale University and Yale Law School.

Maybe it was from teaching young law students at Harvard, Yale and Georgetown. He is generally regarded, according to news reports, as one of the more popular members of the faculty, someone who is accessible and helpful to students.

Maybe it came from a career of public service — as an attorney working with independent counsel Kenneth Starr in the 1990s, as a lawyer advocating for George W. Bush in the Florida recount in 2000, later as staff secretary in the Bush White House, and most recently as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

My guess is that Kavanaugh got most of his character from his parents, who appear to have worked hard in their own lives to accomplish their dreams and seem to have taught him well. An only child, Kavanaugh obviously loves, respects, even idolizes his parents — especially his mother, who herself went from high school teacher to prosecutor to judge. The son is clearly just as proud of his mother as she is of him.

But aside from the question of where Kavanaugh’s character comes from, how do we even know he has it?

That’s easy. Look at how he talked about his family — not just his parents but also the people who know him best because they live with him, his wife and daughters. Given all his accomplishment and accolades, he obviously considers it the great privilege of his life to be husband to Ashley and father to Elizabeth and Margaret. In his remarks, he said, “I thank God every day for my family.”

So what should Americans look for in a Supreme Court nominee?

That’s also easy. We’re conditioned to worship “the big” — those who went to big-name schools, have done big things, have big credentials, have racked up big accomplishments.

Yet we have that upside down. We need to look for “the small” — individuals who have the perspective to consider their family, their country and their God and see themselves as small by comparison.

With Supreme Court justices, we also want people who have the additional quality of seeing themselves as small next to the U.S. Constitution.

We’ll learn more about this particular nominee in the coming days. Liberals and Democrats are on the attack and looking for flaws. It’s just politics. They were going to oppose anyone nominated by President Trump.

But for now, the evidence suggests that Brett Kavanaugh has tons of character. And that is a great place to start.

SAN DIEGO — Abolish ICE?

As political catchphrases go, it’ll do just fine. It’s pithy and punchy. It fits on a bumper sticker. Whether it infuriates or inspires you, it fires you up.

The one thing the slogan doesn’t do is make you think, because that is not the point of it.

DACA is dead. Of course, you already knew this.

It was last year that President Trump terminated the program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. The Obama-era executive action gave Dreamers a two-year work permit and temporary deferment from deportation in exchange for recipients giving over all their personal information.

Now an administration that has — in an unrelated story — shown it has no moral qualms about separating immigrant families has its hands on the names, photos, fingerprints and home addresses of about 700,000 undocumented young people who were desperate enough to take Obama’s deal.

But just because you knew that DACA was dead doesn’t mean you also know that — in a recent development — so are, in all likelihood, Congressional efforts to rescue DACA recipients from possible deportation by authorities.

Even by the standards of the high-octane Trump era — where reporters juggle a dozen breaking stories at once, and the rest of us feel as if we’re standing in front of a fire hydrant that is spewing out information — the last couple of weeks have produced so much news that it’s impossible to catch everything.

One thing you might have missed is that, in the final days of June, House Republicans failed — for the second time in the span of a few months — to pass an immigration reform bill. The first piece of failed legislation was a strict enforcement bill.

The second bill was a compromise pushed by moderates. Among other things, it would have tossed a life preserver to DACA recipients — permanent legal status and eventual U.S. citizenship. Not only that. The bill also gave the same deal to another 900,000 Dreamers who didn’t apply for DACA.

In return, immigration hawks would have received three things they claimed they wanted — $25 billion for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, an end to the diversity lottery, and an end to so-called chain migration.

Both bills failed with no support from Democrats, who talk a good game about helping Dreamers but have trouble following through. Those on the Left rather have a wedge issue than a workable solution. They also dread being labeled the “amnesty party” for those who would attach that word to any attempt to regularize the status of Dreamers.

Meanwhile, Republicans were divided — between moderates and hardliners. Neither camp was much in the mood to support the other’s bill, so nothing got passed.

The fact that Congress blew not one but two chances to save the Dreamers from possible deportation puts a dark cloud over both political parties. On this issue, they’re either corrupt, dishonest or woefully incompetent. Take your pick.

 But this cloud could have a silver lining.

The fact that there no lifeboats gives us the chance to stop to boat from sinking in the first place — and thus save many more people. This includes a very deserving group of undocumented immigrants that always seems to be overlooked, underserved and left out by both the media and the politicians whenever the subject of the Dreamers comes up: their parents, friends, and siblings who don’t go to college.

You see, the original Dream Act — introduced in the Senate in 2001, and on which so many of today’s proposals are based — may have meant well. But it was always an elitist piece of legislation, bestowing the benefit of legal status only on those undocumented immigrants that senators might it easiest to relate to: young people who enroll in college or join the military.

Immigration advocates took it because there was nothing else on the table, but the idea came at a significant psychological cost. After initially going along with all the attention, Dreamers began to feel a kind of survivor’s guilt for being saved while their parents were left in legal purgatory.

In 2012, DACA came along and made the guilt trip even worse. And for what? A half-measure program that required that young people essentially turn themselves into authorities before they could get even a temporary reprieve.

Somewhere along the line, Americans went way off course in attempting to find a special accommodation for Dreamers. Handed a crumb, they defended it as if it were a steak dinner.

The death of DACA, along with multiple recent attempts to revive it, give us a chance to refocus, get back on track, and work toward something fairer and much more worthwhile: comprehensive immigration reform on a broad scale, one steeped in compassion and not limited to what some elements of society consider the best and the brightest.

In the immigration dialogue, terms like “best” and “brightest” are not easy to define. What passes for “skilled” work is a matter of debate; it doesn’t come down to education.

So let’s make the most of this chance. Enough dreaming. Let’s get to work.

Ruben Navarrette, a contributing editor to Angelus News, is a syndicated columnist with The Washington Post Writers Group, a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors, a Daily Beast columnist, author of “A Darker Shade of Crimson: Odyssey of a Harvard Chicano,” and host of the podcast “Navarrette Nation.”

Ay, Chihuahua!

A lot of U.S. columnists, TV commentators and radio hosts haven’t let a little thing like the fact that they know nothing about our neighbor to the south stop them from trying to explain the significance of Mexico’s presidential election.

This bitter cocktail of ignorance mixed with arrogance must be what some folks consider “American privilege.”

There is no disputing that, by electing Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Mexicans took a sharp left turn. AMLO, as he is commonly known, is a self-declared socialist who ran as a left-leaning populist who put Mexico first.

The victory was not unexpected. For several months leading up to the election, polls showed strong support for López Obrador and the party he created: El Movimiento Regeneracion Nacional (The National Regeneration Movement), or Morena.

The 64-year-old former mayor of Mexico City won about 53 percent of the vote — 30 percentage points more than the second-place candidate, Ricardo Anaya.

Yet, not long ago, this outcome was unthinkable. After all, López Obrador lost two previous bids for the presidency, in 2006 and 2012. After his first loss, he was ridiculed by the Mexican media for trying to set up a shadow government.

So what changed in such a short time? Some observers will cite the arrival — on the political stage — of a cynical carnival barker with a yuuuge knack for treating Mexico like a piñata.

Too many Americans hooked on opioids? Blame Mexico. Trade suffering from an “uneven playing field”? Blame Mexico. Too many immigrants eager to do the chores of everyday Americans? Blame Mexico.

Truth is, from what I’ve read and heard on Mexican media in recent months, AMLO’s win had little to do with Donald Trump. You can see how some people in both countries might have thought otherwise. Not long ago, AMLO compared Trump’s way of talking about Mexicans to how Nazis talked about Jews. He has also helped organize protests against hard-line U.S. immigration policies. And he vowed that — if he were elected — he would not allow Mexico to do Uncle Sam’s dirty work of keeping Mexican immigrants or Central American refugees from crossing north into the United States. But all Mexican politicians talk that way.

While Trump might think the hemisphere revolves around him, the Mexican people didn’t get that memo. The issues in this election were security, jobs, economic justice and an end to corruption — in other words, domestic concerns having nothing to do with the United States or its president.

Be prepared to hear in the days ahead that AMLO is nothing like Trump. Supporters of the Mexican president-elect will insist that he wants to uplift the destitute and the downtrodden, not insult and mistreat them.

Still, in terms of politics and personality, AMLO could be Trump’s brother from a Mexican mother. Both ran as political outsiders against the establishments in their respective countries. Both benefited from the fact that people were angry at the major parties and fed up with politics as usual. Both know how to get attention and manipulate the media. Both promise jobs and convince followers that the elites are out to get them. Both rode nationalist waves to power and tapped into the discontent of voters who felt overlooked by the powerful. Both are skeptical of trade deals and are convinced their countries got the short end. Both deflect criticism by making scapegoats out of neighboring countries. And both generate hope in some quarters but fear in others.

In fact, I predict Trump and López Obrador will get along just fine. They understand each other, even if they see the world differently. Who knows? They might even wind up amigos.

The day after the Mexican election, the two men spoke for about half an hour. López Obrador wrote on Twitter that “the tone was respectful,” while Trump predicted to reporters that “the relationship will be a very good one.”

Look at the long game. Mexico and the United States have been squabbling since the mid-19th century, when U.S. troops marched to Mexico City fueled by Manifest Destiny. Yet both countries need each other; Mexico is the United States’ No. 3 trading partner, and it is Mexican law enforcement officials who gather and share the intelligence that keeps Americans safe from terrorist attacks along the U.S.-Mexico border.

So, in spite of the mischief sometimes ginned up by politicians on both sides of the border, divorce is not an option, and the marriage remains strong.

Let’s hope the two amigos keep it that way.

Ruben Navarrette Jr. is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group. His email is ruben@rubennavarrette. com. His daily podcast, “Navarrette Nation,” is available on apps.

The social media site Facebook offers users the option of identifying their relationship status with a vague descriptor: “It’s complicated.”

That phrase might come in handy as we sort through the impact of the retirement of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. The 81-year-old Irish Catholic jurist from Sacramento, California, turned the political world on its head when he announced last week that he was retiring after three decades on the High Court.

It’s always a big deal when there is a vacancy on the Supreme Court. Because these are lifetime appointments we’re talking about, helping to put a particular judge in such a prominent position can be a president’s most important legacy.

But, filling the vacancy caused by Kennedy’s retirement will be a bigger deal than usual because — since the retirement of Sandra Day O’Connor in 2005 — the center-right Irish-Catholic was the crucial “swing” vote on a variety of issues ranging from gun control to same-sex marriage to capital punishment.

President Trump isn’t wasting the opportunity — or wasting any time in coming up with a replacement. He says that, on or before July 9, he’ll announce his pick from a short list that he claims has five names on it — two of which are those of women.

Look at the math. Just a few years ago, before the death of the late Justice Antonin Scalia — the High Court seated, among its nine members, six Catholics: Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Sonia Sotomayor, Samuel Alito, John Roberts and Anthony Kennedy.

This is a stunning demographic fact when you think about it. After all, you have to remember that — of the 113 justices to be nominated or appointed and confirmed to the Supreme Court in the 229 years since the body was founded in 1789 — most of them were Protestant.

The first Catholic on the Court — Roger B. Taney, appointed chief justice by Andrew Jackson in 1836 — is perhaps best forgotten, given that he wrote the majority opinion in the infamous Dred Scott decision which declared black Americans the property of slaveholders.

Others Catholic justices followed, and soon it became something of a tradition to have at least one “Catholic seat” on the High Court. Yet, it’s worth noting that, over the years, there was usually only one Catholic on the Supreme Court at a time.

There is speculation that one of the names on Trump’s list is that of Amy Coney Barrett. A U.S. Appeals Court Judge, Barrett is a graduate of Notre Dame Law School, where she later served as a law professor. She is also a practicing Catholic.

During Barrett’s confirmation hearing for the federal bench, the abortion issue loomed large. Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein accused the nominee of being unable to judge abortion cases fairly because of her faith. “The dogma lives loudly within you, and that’s a concern,” Feinstein lectured Barrett.

“It’s never appropriate for a judge to impose that judge’s personal convictions, whether they arise from faith or anywhere else, on the law,” Barrett cooly responded.

Good for her. But what an outrageous attack by Feinstein. Talk about bias. It’s hard to imagine a prospective jurist who practiced another religion getting that sort of treatment. But with Catholics, it’s par for the course.

In fact, until July 9, we can expect to hear the word “abortion” quite a bit from Democrats and the media — and for that matter, Democrats in the media. After a few days of this, some Americans might even conclude that no other issues ever come before the Supreme Court.

Already, CNN Senior Legal Analyst Jeffrey Toobin has predicted the end of Roe v. Wade, the notoriously creative 1973 Supreme Court decision that somehow found a right to privacy in the Constitution and then extended that right to cover a woman’s decision to have an abortion.

That is certainly taking the long way home. It’s not hard to see why that decision has remained so controversial — no matter who is in the White House, or who sits on the Supreme Court. It’s not resting on firm ground.

But is it fair to assume that a Catholic justice — or even a largely Catholic High Court — would automatically disregard the law, the precedent and the facts of a case because of an adherence to dogma that supposedly “lives loudly” within them?

No, it’s not fair to do that. Nor is it logical.

Judges might decide that continuity counts for something and that young women should have the same Constitutional rights to end a pregnancy that their mothers and grandmothers did.

Consider the example of the man whose decision to retire set all this drama in motion: Anthony Kennedy.

Although he is a Catholic, Kennedy voted with the liberal majority in the landmark 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which upheld Roe and struck down a handful of restrictions on abortion passed by the state legislature in Pennsylvania.

That vote doesn’t make Kennedy a bad man, or a bad Catholic. But it does serve as a good example of how some public servants can separate their faith from their duty.

You see, trying to predict what a judge might decide in a case that has not even yet reached his or her desk yet is tricky business — especially when that judge has the job security of a lifetime appointment, an independent streak, an appreciation for judicial restraint and a dose of common sense.

No matter who replaces Justice Kennedy — and even if his replacement is a Catholic — we can expect him or her to decide cases according to the law and the facts and not much else.

You see, regardless of individual religious views, that person is likely to think of himself or herself as a judge first. With most members of this tribe, it is — above all —  professionalism that lives loudly within them.

Ruben Navarrette, a contributing editor to Angelus News, is a syndicated columnist with The Washington Post Writers Group, a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors, a Daily Beast columnist, author of “A Darker Shade of Crimson: Odyssey of a Harvard Chicano” and host of the podcast “Navarrette Nation.”

No matter which political party they hail from, immigration “solutions” usually come in three varieties: half-baked, hateful and hideous.

You’ll find all of the above as Americans from across the fruited plain refuse to let their ignorance about the issue stop them from putting in their 2 cents about how to solve wanton separation of families at the U.S.-Mexico border.

People also have lots to say about the bigger issue — how to secure the border, legalize the undocumented, provide a workforce to do jobs that Americans think are beneath them, etc.

I am often asked for my own solution, and I hate it. While it’s true that my vision is clearer than most because I’m not beholden to any political party, my ideas are no more valuable than anyone else’s:

■ Keep refugee families together and give them hearings even if it ultimately means deporting the entire family unit;

■ Reform legal immigration not by giving a leg up to the skilled and educated but by tying it more closely to labor needs;

■ Limit the family reunification policy to the spouse, children, parents and siblings of a U.S. citizen;

■ Resist nativist attempts to cut legal immigration and instead increase it from about 1 million annually to 3 million — which is still less than 1 percent of the total U.S. population;

■ Apply asylum laws equally so that brown-skinned refugees from Honduras have the same shot as light-skinned refugees from Syria;

■ Secure the border not with a 12th-century wall but with cutting-edge surveillance equipment, tunnel detection and improved roads;

■ Deploy National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexico border sparingly, and only to support Border Patrol agents;

■ Continue to deport those in the country illegally but preserve discretion to allow some of the undocumented to stay;

■ Create a path to earned legal status (not U.S. citizenship) for illegal immigrants who have lived here for at least 10 years and pass background checks;

■ Give permanent legal status to the estimated 700,000 recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) in exchange for one year of community service;

■ Ban benefits for legalized immigrants and their children (no welfare, food stamps, subsidized housing, etc.);

■ Allow the legalized to become U.S. citizens, as long as they put in the effort and the process isn’t automatic;

■ Scrap unlawful quotas that require immigration agents to deport about 400,000 illegal immigrants annually;

■ Stop counterproductive efforts to deputize local police to enforce federal immigration law;

■ Create a tamper-proof identification card for all Americans to carry so employers know who is eligible to work;

■ Eliminate the exemption in E-Verify that applies to the No. 1 employer of illegal immigrants: the American household;

■ Repair the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which bars employers from “knowingly” hiring illegal immigrants, by removing the word “knowingly”;

■ Create a “three strikes” law for employers of illegal immigrants: First offense, a warning; second, a $10,000 fine; third, five days in jail;

■ Invest in Mexican states that send immigrants by using tax incentives to encourage U.S. companies to create jobs there so fewer people come here;

■ Parent better by giving our kids chores, requiring after-school and summer jobs, and creating a work ethic so they take jobs from illegal immigrants.

Much of this involves Americans owning up to what they did — or didn’t do — that got us into this mess instead of simply blaming immigrants. Which gets us back to where any sensible and realistic stab at immigration reform must begin: honesty.

SAN DIEGO — Never mind Kansas. What’s the matter with Fox News?

Its often callous and careless coverage of the family separation crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border is making people wonder, and I’m one of them.

I’ve offered commentary on Fox News for 16 years, and I’ve been a guest on more than a half dozen shows. This is my preferred news network, even when I disagree with what is said by hosts and guests whose knowledge of the immigration issue is often a taco short of a combination plate.

The nation’s leading cable news network has its share of issues. They include a ratings-driven obsession with race, ethnicity, and national origin — the kinds of things that opportunists gather and light like kindling to draw attention. They also include ham-fisted, dishonest and cringe-inducing treatment of anything related to the immigration debate, much of which has throughout U.S. history been fueled by “-isms”: racism, nativism, ethnocentrism.

Fox hosts and guests are obnoxious

Since the border crisis began several weeks ago, Fox News hosts and commentators have repeatedly come across as glib, obnoxious, and insensitive.

►“Fox and Friends” host Brian Kilmeadenoted that, while the refugees may be suffering, at least “these aren’t our kids.”

►Fox News guest Corey Lewandowski responded to a story about a 10-year-old girl with Down syndrome who had been taken from her mother and put in a cage by saying: “Womp, womp.”

►Fox News host Laura Ingraham likened the harrowing experience of children being separated from their parents and detained in facilities to “summer camps” or “boarding schools.”

►Frequent Fox News guest Ann Coulter expressed skepticism about the entire story and likened the children who had been stripped of their parents to “child actors.”

►Last but not least, there is Fox News host Tucker Carlson who insisted the border crisis wasn’t about families at all but rather an attempt by elites to “change your country forever.”

Carlson is the ringmaster of this circus. He can’t stop pushing the hot buttons of race, ethnicity, immigration, culture, and language. It is why he has been accused — by people like MSNBC Host Joy Reid — of promoting white nationalism.

He recently asked why Americans don’t view Mexico with the same distrust we view Russia. After all, he said, Russia is not invading our country and flooding it with crime and drugs.

Also, this is the same person who invites Latinos onto his show then mocks them if they disagree with him.

A few months ago, it was Cesar Vargas — an undocumented immigrant and lawyer — who got attacked. Carlson talked down to him and questioned his intelligence. He told Vargas: “I know you say you’re a lawyer.” Then he added: “I don’t want to check your bar license.” And this: “I’m not allowing you to teach American history on my show because you’d fail the course.” And finally, Carlson taunted Vargas — who dreams of becoming a U.S. citizen — with “I’m an American and you’re not.” He added: “I don’t think you should become a citizen. No offense or anything.”

Who is Carlson kidding? His schtick is all about offense. He caters to white nativists who believe that all Mexican immigrants are takers and predators and who are fed up with being called “racist” for buying into racist stereotypes.

The strategy is working. “Tucker Carlson Tonight” regularly racks up more than 2.5 million viewers and sometimes closer to 3 million.

But Carlson’s fan base does not include Bob Beckel. The Democratic strategist and former Fox News host recently tweeted a message to him: “I’ve known you for years u were once a decent thoughtful man. What the (expletive) has happened to you. U r too smart to fall for TRUMP’s (expletive)!”

Fox News’ spasm of ugliness has been noticed by Hollywood. Producers are so uncomfortable with how Fox News has reported on the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy that they plan to sever ties with 21th Century Fox Entertainment.

Film producer Judd Apatow called for colleagues to complain about Fox News’ coverage of the border crisis. Attorney General Jeff Sessions “is a (expletive) kidnapper! The Murdoch’s support these policies! Where are the Fox stars and executives speaking up…?” Apatow tweeted, referring to Rupert Murdoch, executive chairman of 21st Century Fox.

Paul Feig — who directed “The Heat” and “Spy” — tweeted that that he would not condone the support Fox News gives to the “immoral and abusive policies and actions taken by this current administration toward immigrant children.”

And Steve Levitan — co-creator and co-executive producer of “Modern Family” — tweeted: “I am disgusted to work at a company that has anything whatsoever to do with @FoxNews. This (expletive) is the opposite of what #ModernFamily stands for.”

What does Fox News stand for these days?

Recently, Carlson tweeted: “More & more it feels like racial division is the subtext of everything. Topics that seem totally unrelated to ethnicity are suddenly racially fraught. The effect is a deeply angry, divided & terrified country. How long do we have to live this way? How did we get here? #Tucker.”

Seriously? How did we get here? Dear #Tucker, you and your buddies at Fox News need to look in the #mirror.

Ruben Navarrette Jr., a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors, is a syndicated columnist with the Washington Post Writers Group and host of the daily podcast, “Navarrette Nation.” Follow him on Twitter: @RubenNavarrette.