It’s a simple question, with a simple answer: anyone who’d like to live here.
Who those many will be, ten or twenty years on, I am not sure. One may be confident that the city will be more diverse, but in which ways there’s no certainty.
(It’s better that there is no certainty, for if there were, we’d not merely know the future, but likely know it because we were trying to control the time from now until then.)
Did some want to bring Arizona’s laws to Wisconsin, and — of all places — Whitewater? One well knows that there were some in this town who wanted exactly that, who dreamed of making something like the Star Packaging Raid the standard practice of this beautiful city. Their dreams were, in truth, the dark nightmares of intolerance and unfairness. They stood against free choice, voluntary exchange, and free markets.
The unreconstructed, nativist impulse to restrict immigration into Whitewater – an impulse that was the fuel of lies, rogue policing, prejudice, and cruelty – is finished in this city, as it is now finished in most of America. (See, along these lines, Rubio Shows Opposition to Immigration Reform is an Inch Deep.)
Those who sought to torment and roust Whitewater’s immigrants, and to build a career or legacy upon it, may now look around and see the ruin of their ambitions. It would have been better for all Whitewater if this rebuke had come sooner, but come it has.
There’ll be rear-guard actions and ferocious kicking and screaming – but a Know Nothing impulse has met its deserved rejection by the majority, a majority with a respect for tolerance and pluralism.
We’re a better city today, and will be a better city in the generation to come, for having turned away from that dark course toward a better one.