Names, like the people who give them, can be terrific liars.

Take, for example, the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea, which is not remotely democratic, run by the people or anything like a republic. (One almost longs for the days of the Austro-Hungarians and the Ottomans, when big, mean empires, while admittedly big and mean, were at least honest about being empires). Or consider the PATRIOT Act, whose provisions for spying on American citizens and trampling all over our basic civil liberties were anything but patriotic.

Ditto for Alabama’s recent “Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act,” a far-reaching bill recently passed by the state legislature and intended to clamp down on illegal immigration. A more appropriate title, it seems, might be “An Act to Raise Prices on Consumer Goods by Increasing the Cost of Labor” or perhaps “A Bill to Terrorize Anyone Who Looks Hispanic, Especially Kids” or even “The Alabama Racial Profiling and Mass Exclusion Act.”

In the time since of the act’s passage, thousands of undocumented children have ceased showing up for school, workers have fled menial jobs in droves and valuable infrastructure construction has slowed for lack of willing labor. The ACLU and the Department of Justice have both filed suit against a law with pernicious effects that, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, amount to a “humanitarian crisis.”

Perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised, given the current tenor of the national debate on immigration. Alabama’s bill looks positively friendly, for example, when compared with the rhetoric of Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain, who suggested at a campaign stop in Tennessee on Oct. 15 that he planned on building a 20-foot-high electrified fence along the border with Mexico designed to kill would-be illegal immigrants.

“It’s going to be 20 feet high. It’s going to have barbed wire on the top. It’s going to be electrified. And there’s going to be a sign on the other side saying, ‘It will kill you — Warning,’” explained Mr. Cain, apparently still upset about the failure of his previous attempts to kill people by serving them millions of terrible pizzas. (It’s not as bad as it sounds, insisted the former Godfather’s CEO; the welcoming all-American sign advertising your impending death by electric shock will be helpfully translated into Spanish.)

But it gets better. Cain joked that his wall would feature a medieval-style moat complete with hungry alligators, though it’s not clear where precisely they would come from. (I’d start by looking in the same circus they must have got the Republican elephant this year, and then checking to see if they can be imported from Uz-beki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan). Taking a cue from Antoine Dodson, Cain has proclaimed that just in case those darn illegals got past the moat, the alligators and the 20-foot-high electrocution zone, he would secure the border “for real” by sending in brigades of soldiers “with real guns and real bullets.”

According to the New York Times, Cain’s remarks were delivered at a pair of campaign rallies in Tennessee and drew thunderous applause from crowds of several hundred. This is not at all surprising, given the fact that attendees at previous Republican events have both booed a gay soldier serving in Iraq and cheered enthusiastically at the thought of an uninsured man dying without medical care.

Cain’s words are also near-standard fare for a Republican field whose crazed enthusiasm for competition apparently extends to the tightly fought contest for Most Bigoted Candidate. Currently in the lead, though not by much, is former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, whose rousing anti-immigrant campaign ad recently vaulted him into first place over former yellow-jersey-holder Rick Santorum.

The ad opens with a clip of an unusually empathetic Governor Rick Perry defending his decision to provide in-state tuition to the children of illegal immigrants. “If you say that we should not educate children who come into our state…by no fault of their own, I don’t think you have a heart,” says Perry, which momentarily raised the likelihood of me voting for him from zero to one in a million.

“MITT ROMNEY HAS A DIFFERENT VIEW,” blares the ad in all caps, just in case we were wondering, before closing with a slide exhorting us to “BELIEVE IN AMERICA” by voting for Mitt this November.
Well, I believe in America, Mr. Romney. But it’s not an America that prides itself on the body count it can rack up by electrocuting its neighbors. My America is better than that.

It is possible, of course, that in the words of people like Mr. Cain and Mr. Romney we are seeing little more than overblown primary-season rhetoric, calculated to appeal to party extremes and soon to disappear under the glare of the national spotlight. We can only hope.

Miles knows we need comprehensive immigration reform; he just thinks an electric fence isn’t the way to do it. Shoot him your ideas at milesu1 “at” stanford “dot” edu.