The debate over immigration reform has once more shown its capacity to fracture the Republican coalition. John McCain, a co-author of last week’s reform bill, recently engaged in a nasty exchange on the Senate floor with fellow Republican John Cornyn of Texas, who opposed the bill. And bill supporters Saxby Chambliss of Georgia and Lindsay Graham of South Carolina were roundly booed at their respective state conventions.
So far, the response by the Republican faithful to the Bush-Kennedy-McCain immigration reform proposal is redolent of both the 1976 uproar surrounding the Panama Canal treaty (which would help make Reagan president in 1980) and the current administration’s Dubai ports fiasco. As with the Panama Canal treaty, which roused patriotic sentiment, immigration in general touches on American’s sense of national identity. But the phenomenon of illegal immigration, which this bill was designed to address, strikes closer to the heart of citizens: working and middle-class voters feel that they have been made foreigners in their own localities by the influx of cheap labor. As with the Dubai ports deal, the Bush administration seems to be undermining its own core principles by failing to put security first.
Bookshelf
• Mid-century modernism has become so retro-chic that it’s easy to forget how many Americans still find it offputting. I never cease to be amazed, for instance, by the number of people I know who loathe modern domestic architecture. Me, I love it, though I freely admit that any number of well-known modern houses are far better looked at than lived in. I recently returned from Chicago, where I visited Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House (1951) and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Muirhead Farmhouse (1953). Mies’ “glass house,” one of the most famous and frequently written-about homes of the 20th century, is the subject of an exceedingly intelligent illustrated monograph by Franz Schulze, author of the standard biography of Mies. The Farnsworth House is out of print, alas, but Schulze’s Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography is still to be had and very much worth reading, not least for its detailed account of the making of this icon of architectural modernism, which is a good deal more candid about the house’s self-evident defects as a “machine for living” (in Le Corbusier’s oft-quoted phrase) than one might expect from an admiring biographer: “Certainly the house is more nearly a temple than a dwelling, and it rewards aesthetic contemplation before it fulfills domestic necessity.”
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