Lou Dobbs has it ass-backwards. You can’t ’secure the borders’ then look at the law and its administration, because once you play border theatre, the election has passed and no-one gives a shit any more.

Instead, you get the paradoxically chauvinistic use of the purported number of ‘illegal’ immigrants (and that’s a very loose term to cover a lot of situations) to suggest that America is oh-so-great because millions of people are desparate to enter. If no-one wanted to come to America, I bet Dobbs would be complaining for different reasons.

The amount of ignorance on display here is amazing, and it’s because the only people who really understand immigration in the US are either immigration lawyers or immigrants themselves. And the latter group doesn’t get to vote. On the other hand, talking tough about Mexicans brings out the Deliverance wing in droves.

All that talk about ‘tamper-proof IDs with digital fingerprints’? Every pundit was oohing about that. Every immigrant was thinking ‘Huh? Sounds just like my green card or EAD.’ Every illegal immigrant was thinking ‘fuck that, it’s easier to claim I’m a US citizen.’

Guess that explains why all Americans are stockbrokers and CEOs.

Yeah, that makes a lot of economic sense.

I think we need to ask ourselves is illegal immigration really an important issue in the face of things like Medicare, Katrina and the war in Iraq. I think logic says it is not. NAFTA has been a disaster not only for Mexico but for the U.S. and Canada as well.

So what is the issue with illegal immigration, the issue is probably a created one hyped by a desperate republican party who are worried about staying in power. Immigration is not taking jobs from Americans rather it is NAFTA that is taking jobs from Americans and Mexicans and Canadians and here is why.

From Public Citizen:

http://www.citizen.org/trade/nafta/

Why such divergent views? NAFTA was a radical experiment - never before had a merger of three nations with such radically different levels of development been attempted. Plus, until NAFTA “trade” agreements only dealt with cutting tariffs and lifting quotas to set the terms of trade in goods between countries. But NAFTA contained 900 pages of one-size-fits-all rules to which each nation was required to conform all of its domestic laws - regardless of whether voters and their democratically-elected representatives had previously rejected the very same policies in Congress, state legislatures or city councils. NAFTA required limits on the safety and inspection of meat sold in our grocery stores; new patent rules that raised medicine prices; constraints on your local government’s ability to zone against sprawl or toxic industries; and elimination of preferences for spending your tax dollars on U.S.-made products or locally-grown food. In fact, calling NAFTA a “trade” agreement is misleading, NAFTA is really an investment agreement. Its core provisions grant foreign investors a remarkable set of new rights and privileges that promote relocation abroad of factories and jobs and the privatization and deregulation of essential services, such as water, energy and health care.

Remarkably, many of NAFTA’s most passionate boosters in Congress and among economists never read the agreement. They made their pie-in-the-sky promises of NAFTA benefits based on trade theory and ideological prejudice for anything with the term “free trade” attached to it. Now, ten years later, the time for conjecture and promises is over: the data are in and they clearly show the damage NAFTA has wrought for millions of people in the U.S., Mexico and Canada. Thankfully, the failed NAFTA model - a watered down version of which is also contained in the World Trade Organization (WTO) - is merely one among many options. Throughout the world, people suffering with the consequences of this disastrous experiment are organizing to demand the better world we know is possible. But, we face a race against time. The same interests who got us into NAFTA are now pushing to expand it and lock in 31 more countries in Latin American and the Caribbean through the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) and five Central American countries through a Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA).

I encourage you to continue to prepare the way for this country to acknowledge its unperformed moral responsibilities toward all people who live here. To paraphrase the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., the arc of history bends toward justice - and your voice draws us closer to the powerful sweep of that arc.