Not enough illegal aliens here yet. Must get more. Más, más.

Some Americanos will have to leave – go to Madagascar, or somewhere. Clear some room for us. Learn Spanish. Buy an accordion. Shut up.

Ricardo Montal-Williams

I am now reconsidering what I just said about opening the floodgates and letting everyone move here.

Re: the illegals, why not make more immigration legal? What is the problem? The work obviously needs to be done. Once they get here, they use services, but also they start working and pay taxes; overall, they give more than they take. Why are the immigration limits so much lower than they should be? 11,000+ years ago, no one was on this continent; everyone here immigrated or descended from an immigrant (voluntarily or involuntarily). Why are we so greedy and selfish?

But as the world gets smaller, and more and more business sectors seize the opportunity presented by outsourcing, our middle and lower economic classes will continue to be squeezed tighter until the cost of freight tips the scales (rather than wages). Neither party is likely to find a voice that can mollify the cries of people constantly adjusting to fewer economic choices, when part of being American is the promise of moving up through hard work, not down. Xenophobia will always exist when it’s us vs. them. We need to demonstrate our grasp of macroeconomic reality, and understand that when it comes to those who would migrate to America in search of a better life, “there, but for the grace of God.” Some of us don’t realize what it takes to remain a country to which people want to migrate.

Democrats can demonstrate that they understand the challenge of global competition, and engage with the independents’ and moderates’ faith in the “Can Do” attitudes of Americans to work harder and innovate more than any other country on Earth. We enjoy the inestimable advantage of the finest judicial system in the world combined with the freedom to question authority and, minus universal wi-fi, a fully developed infrastruture.

When it comes to illegal immigrants, we need to pledge to confront the problem in the most pragmatic and ethically consistent way- by going after the employers who hire them in tougher ways. At the same time, we should appreciate the risk illegal immigrants take and the hard work they do. These are people not without their own “Can Do” attitude.

We need to paint a picture of what our economy is likely to look like should we do nothing in preparation of the exponential increase in outsourcing as the developing world (China and India foremost among them) realizes its organic potential (education, communication, highways, energy, etc.). We then need to paint a picture of what our country could look like if we prioritize now, and teach our children to be global competitors as well as global citizens.

But a combination of doing the math and realizing that working a full time job as a technoserf, and then a second job on top of that, at double minimum wage, I was *still* falling farther and farther behind just keeping up with my student loan payments (while my bosses bought new SUVs and new houses and went to Aruba regularly), and reading NYT articles about exploitation of workers in developing nations, and listening to the BBC on the way home, I began to hve a better understanding of the anti-globalization protests and to formulate in my mind what I call “The problem of World Helotry” and a synthesis of social justice issues which informs all my posts – and which was key to putting together the pieces of the Money Trail that ties the “Social Conservative” side with the “Fiscal Conservative” and “Libertarian” sides of the grand coalition that is currently and for many years now running this country.

And the problem of the Charitable Solutions solution, which are nothing but bandaids on an amputation, however much they may make upper & middle class Americans and Europeans *feel* better about themselves, the assuaging of Bourgeois Guilt is not particularly helpful to the world.

People don’t want to dig into it, because questioning any of the premises, like questioning the “Strong on Defense!” mantra and asking how spending so much more of our budget than anyone else in the world, creating poverty at home to enforce helotry abroad, actually makes us *safer* – opens an industrial sized kettle of carnivorous bloodworms.

People don’t want to think about it, because then they’d have to face the problems of how their lifestyles – the ability to buy cheap coffee and sugar and bread even tho’ its trucked many thousands of miles, the “right” to cheap gasoline, to have clothes off the rack that cost less than an hour of your salary (if you are a history buff, it’s easier to put this all in perspective) and every other invisible absorbed costs of our infrastructure – are subsidized by the misery and essential slavery of strangers, either invisible at home by social divides and ghettoization, or kept far away by the miracle of outsourcing which is the “miracle” of cheap plentiful petroleum…

It’s the same reason that the Founding Fathers and their subsequent generations of Establishment refused to address and stop slavery until it was too late.

Much easier to point to how the opposition was full of dirty hippies – romantic poets and free love types and these radical Wollenstonecraft feminists, atheists and liberal Christians and Theosophists and all the rest of the weirdos, with no stake in Society and no Respect for Tradition, the way New England pundit Orestes Brownson justified his opposition to Abolition.

Because dismantling the whole system that kept cheap raw materials flowing from Port of New Orleans to Manchester and Lowell to keep our textile industry competetive with England’s – raw materials only cheap because of the cheap labour down south – was unthinkable, as unthknable as paying a living wage to striking New England women in the 1840s instead of importing dirt-poor French Canadians and denying them the right to vote based on the fact that they didn’t speak English…

Ordinary Americans wouldn’t stand for not being able to buy cheap cotton goods, and wealthy Americans wouldn’t have been able to keep their carriages and massive Italianate mansions. Better to fight a war, slaughter hundreds of thousands and destroy half our own infrastructure – and in the end, for all the talk of liberty, keep the same people as helots, though the fiction that everyone was free and equal could now be maintained more easily.

Hey, illegals are great! They’re afraid to complain, they daren’t unionize, and if anyone annoys you it’s easy to just tip off l’immigracion and get them rounded up.

You know, it’s so hard to get good help these days, and a population that automatically bows their heads and shuffles is so much easier to control.

Cheap Labor Conservatives: They know how to solve our problems.