From Whence They Come

When campaigning for office, you do a lot of unsavory things. Kissing babies should probably be considered a perk. Compromises have to be made. You might shade your convictions to the left or right in order to gain traction in a particular segment of the populace, or have your picture taken with someone with whom you secretly despise. Even with the protracted election season offered here in the United States, it would be impossible to create consensus between each and every person who might end up casting their vote for you. Sometimes we end up, on the voters' side, picking what we call "the lesser of two evils." 
Good news for those of you shopping on the Republican side then, since there are lots more than two evils from which to choose. Today I will choose "none of the above," but focusing on Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. Both of these gentlemen are sons of Cuban emigres, running for their party's shot at the highest office in the land. They are doing this with the full and seemingly unflinching GOP stance against immigration. For his part, Marco Rubio is currently backing away from a previous commitment to creating a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. Ted Cruz double down on his narrow perception of the situation this way: “The frontline with ISIS isn’t just in Iraq and Syria, it’s also in Kennedy airport and the Rio Grande.” Cruz said. “Now we’ve seen what happened in San Bernardino. When you’re letting people in, when the FBI can’t vet them, it puts American citizens at risk.”
American citizens like Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, for example. Men who are currently a generation away from arriving on the shores of the land of the free and the home of the yadda yadda yadda and currently engaged in a struggle for the wild-card position in the playoffs for President of the United States. You might remember that this was the party, the one with the elephant for a mascot, who wanted all kinds of insane proof of the citizenship of our current president. I can now imagine a future in which a future President of the United States is left outside our borders because his or her parents had the bad taste to imagine a future in a country where anyone can grow up to be President of the United States. It sounds a little like a forgotten episode of Star Trek, but maybe that's a good thing, since it would be science fiction and not public policy. 
Does it make any more sense that Donald Trump, son of an Italian hairdresser, would be so vehement about restricting the way people become part of the fabric of our nation?  Okay. I made that last thing up, but if they can, why can't I?