You got to the heart of the problem. Immigration, legal and illegal, is indvisibly linked to our economic situation. We are totally confused about our economic situation, so it’s small wonder we can’t deal with the tamgemtal immigration problem.

We have been conditioned to demand cheap goods.
That means low wages for workers, whether here or in China. It makes no sense whatsoever to applaud our economy because we have access to cheap goods but at the same time complain about all those foreign laboreres clogging up our neighborhoos
We are developing a stagnant lower class, while simultaneously complaining about their inability to act like the upper class.

All the pieces are interrelated. We have to recognize how things function in their complexity instead of just complaining about this or that aspect. There is a domino effect, and we should be worrying about managing the dominoes so that they all don’t fall down.

We sing the praises of globalization, privatization and deregulation, but we don’t think through what that means in terms of a huge underpaid work force.
Then we look around and decide we don’t like the sight of all those cheap workers clogging up our neighborhoods

Got news for you Austin, it isn’t playing very well with the majority on the left either.

Take a trip over to Crooks and Liars blog anytime they run a “poor brown people” post and read the comments by the regulars. In those comments you will see a 60/40 devide, and sometimes even bigger against the “poor brown people” arguments made by the far leftists that aren’t being impacted by the invasion. But you’ll see a majority that aren’t taking the bait, and many chiming in about themselves, and others being impacted by it.
So before you play the “poor Republican” card realize it isn’t even about political parties anymore, it’s a much bigger issue in regions like the South, and MidWest where the support for upholding immigration laws as is are across the board….like the Dem on our city council that just got a tough law passed to go after employers here 2-3 days ago.

Depending on a few slogans is precisely why we can’t solve any of our problems Look around you, and you’ll see how complex life is. It’s like peeling
an onion. Under each layer is another layer. To think that any one formula will solve all problems is to believe in fairy tales.
Privatization only works if it benefits more than the private owners. Deregulation only works if it doesn’t lead to exploitation.
Every formula needs qualifiers if it is to avoid the disasterous effects of overkill.
The pattern we follow, however, is 1.slavish devotion to a simplistic formule, and 2. backlash swinging too dar in the other direction.

Slogans don’t impress me,
Development in Mexico should be based on an examintion of why NAFTA failed in Mexico as well as an analysis of what parts of it could be beneficial.
Just repeating past failures won’t solve anything.

….

A law isn’t a magic wand. We’ll do better by restricitng law making to those that are enforceable.
It’s much more useful to look for ways to manage a problem than to look for abslolutist measures that are unrealizable.

Bingo, exactly what I’ve been saying. The question doesn’t have anything more to do with illegals, anymore than the drug question has anything to do with illegality.

Saying ‘people should follow the law and be punished when they don’t’ is near nonsensical if, you know, it doesn’t appear to actually work. It might be a clever idea to figure out 1) What we want to happen, and only then 2) What laws we should make to make that happen.

Two important considerations for 1)

a) If there remains incentives for large number of people to enter the country, the organized smuggling rings, which make this country very insecure, will continue to operate, period. You can’t build walls, people would exploit holes in them. You can’t build magical perfect walls, people would just take to the oceans. (If people can get here from Cuba, they can certainly float up the coast a few miles from Mexico.)

And there are a lot of people we really don’t want in the US. Stupid people will claim that, no matter what, those people can get here, which is true, but it’s a hell of a lot easier if thousands of others are doing likewise and there’s an entire organized system set up to sneak people in. It’s a lot harder if a terrorist has to sneak in alone.

b) Food prices right now depend on underpaying workers. And ‘underpay’ doesn’t only mean ‘under min wage’…even if they were paying minimum wage, they couldn’t find enough Americans to do it at that price. Raising the wages means raising food prices.

There’s plenty of other issues in 1), but people in both parties often just seem to skip to 2), ’solving’ the problem, without any consideration of what sort of solution we should aim for.

Talking about ‘illegals’ just confuses the issue.

Ultimately, John Maynard Keynes is responsible for more ejidatoarios swimming across the river than anything else.

What Mexico needs is Mexico-based development, not fly-by-night US corporations that come in, rearrange the local economy and then leace when the profits pickings are greener elsewhere.

Trade can only work when investors come with a sense of reponsiblity, not just open hands for profits.

To be fair plenty of Republicans hate NAFTA and its ilk.

The problem starts in Mexico. Why aren’t we doing anything to encourage job creation there?

Funny you should mention that…….business people are trying to do exactly that and the Democrats are crying foul.

Unenforceable laws are as ineffective as no laws.
Our drung enforcement laws have done zip to reduce drug use, but instead, have crimilnalized so much of the population that they have effectively worked to exclude large segments from a legal road to earning a living.; the result is more drug trafficking.

A law isn’t a magic wand. We’ll do better by restricitng law making to those that are enforceable.
It’s much more useful to look for ways to manage a problem than to look for abslolutist measures that are unrealizable.

Just how complex this is becomes evident in interviews with the people most directly afftected, those who live in areas crossed by illegals on their way further up in search of jobs. There is the justified outrage about broken fences and stolen livestock, and there is also the justified outrage about finding bodies dead of thirst when movig about their neighborhoods. It’s not right that personal property and safety can’t be protected, and it’s not right when people have to risk death in order to feed their families.

Prejudice feeds on this confusion. As the fear of a changing demographic feeds one kind of prejudice, concern for the Latino population feeds another type: prejudice agomst all attempts to make those changes orderly and manageable.
Well intentioned humanitarian efforts (like those of some Cathokic congregations) complicate the road to a solution as much as those who want to subject Latino looking citizens to a demand for on-the-spot documentary proof of legal residence at every step of their lives.

The longer we wait before we come to a comprehensive compromise, the more complex the outcome will become, and the more intense will be our vaious prejudices.

While we debate the ultimate solution, we need to get away from arguing about it one facet at a time and start dealing with the overreaching problems.
>The problem starts in Mexico. Why aren’t we doing anything to encourage job creation there?
> Our immigration system is broken. Why aren’t we reforming the process of legal immigration and co-ordinating better between national and local law enforcement ?

I didn’t say remove quotas and let the flood gates in.

But to address your specific points.

1. Well the biggest reason why millions more wouldn’t enter the country is because there are only so many people TRYING to come to the States. And, truth be told, millions of illegals would be far less of a burden to the US if we allowed open access across the borders for them.

2. Latinos are next door. They have a much greater influence on America than Africans. Our immigration policy isn’t based on altruism and it never has been.

3. This is just a bizarre argument. First you argue that the reason we shouldn’t expand the quotas is because it will…… send a bad message to the people waiting in the quota queue? Secondly where did I say anything about eliminating legal mechanisms?

We could solve the illegal immigrant problem tomorrow. We could simply expand the quota of Mexicans and other latinos so that none of them are illegal. Problem solved.

According to the blog clock it’s very early in the morning, so I’m assuming you hadn’t had your coffee yet. Surely you haven’t thought that statement through otherwise you could easily see that it’s deeply flawed.

1. If we suddenly decided that every single illegal in the US was legal, what’s to stop millions more illegals from flooding across the borders? They would, don’t doubt it, other countries have done massive amnesty programs before and it creates a call effect. First off, companies will need new workers to cruelly exploit, and since legal immigrants can demand rights, they’ll want more illegals. All you’d achieve is a 10 million new legal immigrants plus another batch of illegals.

2. Why give Latino immigrants all this favorable treatment? Quite frankly, Africans are a lot worse off than Latinos, and filling the immigrant quota with Latinos effectively closes the door to all the other nationalities, many in a much greater state of need.

3. What kind of message does that send to those who patiently wait their turn in line to enter the country? 10 million is a lot of people, some of them are quite probably criminals, do we legalize them? We’d need to check their background, but for that you need paperwork. That’s the whole point of having a legal process, to ensure that decent people who can contribute get in and bad people who will harm us don’t.

Illegal immigration isn’t going to be solved by simply declaring all illegals legal. That’s like deciding drunk driving isn’t a problem by eliminating breathalyser tests. See, no more drunk drivers! If you’re going to simply declare that being illegal means nothing then say so, say that legal is anyone who wants to live in the country, period. It’ll be a disaster, but it would be more honest than our current approach (on both ends of the political spectrum).

We could solve the illegal immigrant problem tomorrow. We could simply expand the quota of Mexicans and other latinos so that none of them are illegal. Problem solved.

Yet I suspect that many people who oppose illegal immigration might find that solution undesirable. So I question how much their “illegal” status really matters.

Can anyone assert with any degree of certainty that Paul Krugman has even had a meaningful conversation with a Republican, much, much less, have a true insight into what they are thinking?

Here’s an actual fact that runs counter to all this supposition……..Giuliani is clearly the most pro-immigration Republican candidate. Which Republican candidate has “the base” put in front?

There is a real problem with illegal immigration. But the GOP base is not driven solely by law-and-order concerns here. To say so is to be as naive as Republicans in the past who proclaim “colorblindness” when speaking of African Americans. It’s a lie, and an insidious one designed to shield the real motives of a party whose elected officials are almost 100% white (outside Cuban Florida).

I know, officially they’re not hostile to Hispanics in general, only to illegal immigrants, but that’s a distinction neither the G.O.P. base nor Hispanic voters takes seriously.

Oh really? This reeks of the same old argument, by which anyone opposing illegal immigration must first prove that they are not a racist, guilty until proven innocent. I could imagine that most (though not all) Hispanic voters might see attacks on illegal immigration as attacks on the whole community. After all, if you’re a legal Hispanic immigrant, it’s likely you know some illegals, quite possibly within your own family, and feel any action against them acutely. On the other hand assuming that the “GOP base” sees no difference between legal and illegal immigration, just “brown people” depends on what you call the “GOP base”. If you limit it to white supremacist members and their ilk ok, but quite frankly I think that they are a vanishingly small proportion of the GOP base. I find it far more likely that the majority of the GOP base really wants what they say they want, a crackdown on ILLEGAL immigration. If this were to happen animosity towards the Hispanic community in general would go down. As it stands now legal immigrants are unfairly given the resentment meant for the illegals. I know to many people the difference is just a piece of paper, but it’s a piece of paper that shows you give a damn about the law of the country you choose to inhabit.

The long term question is what will the U.S. be like as a one party state. Which model (California, Maryland, Mass, or Illinois) will the U.S. end up following?