Trust in government represents a leap of faith on the part of Americans, especially when it comes to large, complex, and extremely consequential policy legislation like the immigration bill now before Congress. That leap of faith actually consists of dual parts of hope and confidence.
Trust rests on the hope that our leaders are acting in good faith and putting forward immigration proposals in the public interest and not primarily partisan policy proposals. It also depends on confidence that an expectation of fairness and evenhandedness in the policy debate process has not been misplaced.
When debates about large-impact legislation like immigration take place, the public wants to be both educated and reassured.
Both wishes are easy to understand. The public is not made up of immigration experts. They are not knowledgeable about such diverse parts of immigration policy as the impact of skilled and less-skilled workers on the economy and the civic community, family reunification policy, the studies that support and challenge various immigration economic studies, and how all of these are related. They expect the public debate to help them understand what's at stake in ways that that will help them make their judgments accordingly.
And in doing so, they hope to be reassured that their president, congressional leaders, and others who are more technically expert will conduct themselves in a manner that allows the public to have confidence that the final legislation will have been arrived at fairly, reflecting even-handed substantive judgments. It is this process that allows the public to feel, legitimately, that its best interests are being served.
Spelling out the above process is not a matter of holding naive civil ideas, or being blind to the ways in which the legislative system that produces "big bills" consistent with the preference for "big government" often actually works. We now have ample documentary and scholarly evidence of the debacles that can ensue when government attempts to control large, complex economic social and cultural forces and what it doesn't really understand, such as the Dodd-Frank bill's efforts to regulate Wall Street, the massive federal intervention in the housing market, and most recently the government's effort to nationalize regulation of the American health care system.
When you add these results to the decades that it took to correct some of the unexpected results of the last big push for "big government" solutions (Lyndon's Johnson's "Great Society") it would be naive, foolish, and determinedly partisan to ignore the modern historical record.
Some of these efforts were well-intentioned, others were monuments to presidential ambition. All of them were built on untested premises and have produced a rash of intended and unwanted results that have and will continue to ricochet through American culture for decades.
You can be absolutely certain that the same thing will happened if the Senate's comprehensive immigration legislation is passed.
Next: Immigration Reform and the Government Trust Crisis