What would Martin Niemoller think about Arizona?

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by Griff

...which brings us back to the drug war and the Mexican economy, the real problems.

I agree with Griff here. We don't actually have an immigration problem. Rejiggering our immigration rules and their enforcement will not answer to the trouble we're having.

The problem is in Mexico and I think it can only be solved there: Mexico does not have a middle class visible to the naked eye. To achieve a bootstrapping up from dismal poverty to the lower middle class, the Méxicanos have to travel al Norte. Some carry this all the way to Canada's cities and towns.

Which is likely to improve the quality of Mexican restaurants throughout the continent.

The historical source of Mexico's lack of a middle class and its opportunities is easy enough to see: unlike the US and Canada, Mexican Spanish immigration -- and it was at first exclusively so -- was not a flood of smallholders, each with his stake in the enterprise. It was a sparse settlement of primarily the aristocratic landowning class and their retainers, recreating the only economy they knew: the latifundian economy of Spanish landowners and Spanish peasants. Thus they created it and thus it remained. All over the place and for centuries.

So, the 1960s joke had it that Latin America resembles an LP record -- 33 1/3 revolutions per minute. The twentieth century was when it all came to a head, building on some brawling begun in the nineteenth. Every bit of it over resources, at bottom.

So, short of revolution and raping real estate away from people who used to have it, and rationing it out to people who used not to have it, what? Well, an organic, viral answer was to export labor. Population too. Guess who's importing.