I was also struck by the fascist (communist) idea of regulating people leaving the country.

Immigration from Latin America is obviously driven by economic factors. Insofar as you might regard immigrants as a problem, you might want to seriously examine the factors that draw them. This would be in the spirit of studying the disease rather than attacking the symptoms.

Of course it is much easier to kick poor Latino immigrants than it is to kick the large, powerful business interests that are addicted to poor Latino labor. I can see that it's much more fun, too. Sort of like the "Drug War." The policy isn't effective in addressing the nominal objective, but it is extremely effective if you like prisons, a large criminalized underclass, authoritarian government, and plenty of distractions for dangerously angry middle class white guys.

Interesting blog - I'll have to read more. Stop by ours. But regarding the border, there are so many double agenda going on with all sides, that it's impossible to have a coherent conversation about it in politics. The populist right is at odds, supposedly, with the corporate and ideolgical factions. This kind of stress is beneficial for the administration. Meanwhile, Fox wants to facilitate this too. He wants to be able tocomplain about it, and he wants the money sent back home. But as time goes on, our economy has become dependent, it seems, on this two tier labor scale. But the admin, doesn't seem to mind. They just give it lip service. The status quo is good for shifting blame and avoiding accountability.

Um, the article is an opinion piece was written by Castaneda, former Foreign Minister of Mexico. It seems reasonable that Mexicans write from a Mexican persepective, and think that Mexico have 'a place at the table'.

Why not address why people are leaving in the first place? That seems like a much better policy than regulating either emigration, immigration, or anything at all.

Yes, it appears to just be a guest column - an OP-Ed - which is kosher. Maybe it could have been better labeled as such.

Easy Mark:

It looks to me like the issue is the fact that we pretty much can't address the immigration issue head-on politically. This would involve taking on some kind of uncomfortable decision like "Do you want to close the border, and accept a doubling of prices for produce, construction work, etc., or do you want to legitimize the status of the people we're bringing in to do those jobs?" Politicians never like bringing up painful tradeoffs.

If we weren't pretending not to let millions of immigrants live and work here illegally (so we don't have to admit we're making a decision to let cheap labor in so we get cheap products and services), we'd simply set up a program to let people in who wanted to work here and could demonstrate that they weren't likely to become a drain on tax dollars. We'd check their fingerprints against the files for known felons and terrorists, check them for communicable diseases, and give them an ID card. Then, they wouldn't need to be doing business with criminals all the time to get fake IDs, get across the border, etc. And as a result, serious criminals and terrorists wouldn't have a huge pool of basically innocent transactions to hide in. But that would require being honest about what we're doing, and that loses elections, so I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it.

Securing *Mexico's* Southern border? Am I missing something here?

Look, white women don't want to cook. They don't want to take care of babies. They don't even want to HAVE babies. They don't want to wash clothes. They want servants -- dishwasher, Cook, Nanny, yard boy.

They all want to be Betty Friedan feminists: a wealthy husband Carl plenty of servants, nice home, nice vacation home, and all the time in the world to write political screeds about how evil men are.

And the best part about championing illegal aliens is that they can pat themselves on the back about being good liberals.

It's a win-win situation for a feminist: you get to live off the sweat of poor people, you get to put other evil demanding white people out of a job, and you get to pretend you're still a good leftist like you were in college.

I hung out in nanny bars in Manhattan and Yonkers for a few years. I know the shtick cold.

Yeah, Mark, if only we can get rid of those "dangerously angry quite middle-class guys" and trade them for a bunch of Mexican peasants. We could eliminate the unions (a favorite place for them to hang out!) And replace them with a bunch of Yassum!, Yassuh!, Stepinfetchit medieval peasants.

Think about it, Mark, isn't that exactly what they've got in Mexico? Tens of millions of ignorant Indians ruled over by a handful of white folks who enjoy working them to the bone?

I just love your vision for America!

College boys who have utterly no conception of what it's like growing up and living on the left side of the Bell curve like most black folks and poor white folks in America are oh so eager to import 6 billion ignorant peasants from all over the world. It assuages their guilty middle-class conscience. But it's not your job they're going to get, is it Mark? It's going to be Doofus Bill who barely got his GED and can only work in McDonald's. But he doesn't deserve a living wage, does he, Mark?

Feh. It drives me crazy whenever college boy liberals start going on about saving America by importing 50 or 100 million scab workers from other countries to drive wages down. Come the revolution, Mark baby, we'll know who our friends are.

We shot up the Pinkertons when they tried to drive our wages down with imported slave labor. Pretty soon, we may have to do it all over again.

M.P.
Full Book No. P-1105 SIUNA-AGLIWD

I have been following this issue, on and off, for a few years, ever since I accidentally went to Arizona, and fell in love with the desert. Illegal immigration comes up in the papers there, frequently.

From what I remember, President Fox was opposed to immigration controls, and I had always believed that President Bush had put this matter on the back burner, in partial deference to the wishes of Mr. Fox, whom he respected and thought of as an ally. Newsweek seems to have it exactly the other way around. I cannot see President Fox saying that we should control ou immigration in order to prevent a backlash.But when has Newsweek been detered by facts?

Big Bill,

I was making observations about what is, not offering a justification. On a personal level, I don't favor massive immigration by poor latinos. However, the border wall project is a stupid boondoggle distraction for angry chumps, not a method by which to prevent immigration.

We each have a choice to make about being angry, but we also have a choice to make about being a chump. "If you don't control your emotions, somebody else will." That's something a guy said about confrontations in a bar, and he weren't no fricken' pacifist.

The border wall is being waved in front of you like a cape in front of a bull. Get it?

Actual solutions to the immigration problem involve stuff like higher minimum wages and higher taxes. Hell on earth for Libertarians and corporate fascists.

The proper way to enforce would be to fine the employers of illegals. Nothing has been done because the right wants cheap labor and the left wants the cheap votes.

Many of my grad school classmates were from top notch Mexican universities and found it difficult to get H1B visas after their studies here, but thier uneducated and often illiterate countrymen just cross the river. We are allowing the wrong people to immigrate to this country.

Easy Mark writes:
[However, the border wall project is a stupid boondoggle distraction for angry chumps, not a method by which to prevent immigration.]

Isn't it harder to climb, cut through, or dig under a fence than simply walk across the ground? Why are the Israelis building a fence? Do they expect it to fail utterly? They are building it because it's an easy and obvious obstacle to cut down on illegal entrances, but they don't dream it will completely stop them. Why do you bother to lock your front door at night when people could just bust it down (I apologize that the analagy is a little rude)? You do it because it makes you incrementaly safer. Yes going after employers will help as well, I'm for that too, but that doesn't negate the value of a wall (it's a right step in and of itself). If you are worried about people crossing in more dangerous areas, make it from sea to sea. Patrol it with unmanned drones.

Defend yourself when you say a fence will reduce illegal immigration by a merely trivial amount. 25% less illegals from Mexico is an ultra-super-duper-conservative, and definately non-trivial estimate for a gulf to pacific barrier.

Easy Mark writes:
[Actual solutions to the immigration problem involve stuff like higher minimum wages and higher taxes. Hell on earth for Libertarians and corporate fascists.]

About minimum wages, yes you are right that higher minimum wages would help most poor people, but at the expense of higher unemployment for those at the even further extreme bottom rungs of the ladder (ie: those who don't/can't add as much value to a business as you legislate thier minimum wage to be).

About higher taxes, you admitting that this is a solution to immigration shows that you know unskilled immigrants consume far more government services than they pay in taxes. The question is why you think we should raise the taxes instead of stopping the unskilled immigrants from coming? You must think that a massive investment in public education and college loans to hispanics (financed by higher taxes) will help make more of them into net tax-payers some day, and counteract a lowering of productivity growth from what it could have been. That is the same conclusion this article came to as well:

Business Weeks: America the Uneducated

http://www.businessweek.com/prin...108.htm? chan=mz

some excerpts:
[Because workers with fewer years of education earn so much less, U.S. living standards could take a dive unless something is done, the report argues. It calculates that lower educational levels could slice inflation-adjusted per capita incomes in the U.S. by 2% by 2020. They surged over 40% from 1980 to 2000.......

.....Callan's projections are based on the growing diversity of the U.S. population. As recently as 1980, the U.S. workforce was 82% white. By 2020, it will be just 63% white. Over this 40-year span, the share of minorities will double, to 37%, as that of Hispanic workers nearly triples, to 17%. The problem is, both Hispanics and African Americans are far less likely to earn degrees than their white counterparts. If those gaps persist, the number of Americans age 26 to 64 who don't even have a high school degree could soar by 7 million, to 31 million, by 2020. Meanwhile, although the actual number of adults with at least a college degree would grow, their share of the workforce could fall by a percentage point, to 25.5%......

.....How can the trends be reversed? Jennings argues that the U.S. must push harder to get better teachers into poorer schools. States must also work far harder to keep students from dropping out of high school even as they raise graduation requirements. Today, only about a third of high school grads are prepared for college, estimates Achieve's Cohen. Many need remedial courses, a key reason why fewer than half of those who begin college earn a BA, says Cohen, whose group is working with 22 states to raise their high school graduation requirements. And more generous financial aid could make it easier for low-income students to go to college.....
]

This thinking of educations transformatory powers is predicated not only on the idea that all groups have the same average levels of intelligene, but on the idea that an individuals intelligence is mutable over time! All, I can say is I pray to god that is correct. I'm not going to get into that, because as is mentioned on gnxp often, new developments will eventually settle that question. But I think we can argue about the portion of IQ/achievement/income that is predicated on culture. Can you deny that hispanics are a large enough group to not assimilate fully or rapidly? Lets say you can put hispanics in with the same gifted teachers and the same expensive teaching materials/classrooms as all the privelaged white kids get, and lets assume hispanics have the same genetic potential for average IQ as whites. You still won't get the same results if there aren't as many books or lower quality books in the hispanic childrens homes, and/or studying and education in general is not stressed as much. And the higher the immigration of hispanics is, the slower this will change.

Also, I'd like to comment on your drug analogy. People on drugs are often sick and can't stop if thier life depends on it, which is why some steal from own mother (It's happened in my extended family, it's not just a cliche). How many illegal aliens steal from thier own mother to get money to be smuggled to the U.S? I'd bet not many, but if I'm wrong it would undercut the hispanic family values claim :) I thus think that people illegally coming to the US can be more easily deterred than people satisfying thier chemical addictions.

Also about hispanic immigration, let's say that in 20 years time the hispanic murder rate converges down to the white rate, (something the black rate hasn't done for far longer) how many people of other races had to die in the meanwhile? Would not less people been murdered in america if the same number of asians been imported in thier place?

In summary, the demographic transformation of america with latinos is a risky scheme that can come out alright only if certain assumptions hold valid. Thus proponents of it should have the burden of proof on thier sides, not the risk aversive immigration restrictionists.

I'm the child of immigrants, and I'm in favor of immigration restriction. Mostly because I'm a lefty and don't like seeing wages driven down.

I DO think (as was written in the American Conservative) that we need to work harder to avoid even the appearance of racism in our arguments. I think PC sensitivity is overrated but it is a reality we have to deal with and this problem is going to become irreversible if it isn't stopped. Working hard to make the movement as multicultural as possible (irony of ironies!) and stressing economic factors like depressed wages can help us win over the middle.

I really don't know how people can think mass immigration of tons of poor, unskilled people is good. Haven't immigration activists ever traveled through shitty, heavily immigrant neighborhoods (which is most of them)? Or are they too busy focusing on their successful non-white peers, thinking that other non-whites could all do just as well or better if it weren't for "classism" and "racism?" I think the reality is that most multicultural, "anti racist," feminist types (and that all too many mostly sensible rank-and-file Republicans and Democrats are influenced by) only think in terms of how wonderfully unselfish they are. It's easy to be sympathetic to Americans living paycheck to paycheck--so this sort of thing is not nearly enough for the multiculturalist or far leftist. One must be so "unselfish" as to care about the worst of the worst--Gitmo prisoners, Al-Qaedas, gangbanging, murderous thugs, and the like. Essentially extreme leftism amounts to showing one's compassion by how suicidal one is.

You all seem to be missing the point. What does all this have to do with Brokeback Mountain?