Immigration

The greatest wonder about the current debate, for me, anyway, is that it seems to be taking place with all of the innocence and naïveté of all the previous debates that have drifted through the District of Columbia, securely embedded a couple thousand miles from Mexico, every 20 to 25 years, almost like clockwork. We do hear occasional knowing references to the last one, round about 1986, the last time that Congress heard the cries of the constituents begging for relief from all of the Mexican laborers they had brought across the Rio Grande in exchange for hard labor at low wages with, most important of all, no job security whatever for anyone inclined to rock the boat.
As everyone who has paid attention knows, this spurious discussion flares up periodically, probably because of the ambivalence most Americans feel about 1. living on land in California and throughout the West taken from Mexico in an 1846 war of aggression 2. terrorizing and exploiting a work force in order to squeeze demeaning and sometimes health and even life-threatening labor from the descendants of the people they expelled in the process 3. confronting both their own otherness and their own ignorance whenever they hear Spanish, or any other language other than English, spoken. You can follow the series of phony debates past the turmoil at the turn of the last century triggered by the arrival of southern Europeans and Mediterranean peoples at Ellis Island, and 20 years before that with the Chinese Exclusion Act and other measures taken to insure that San Francisco didn't become a Chinatown or have to share any of its plunder with one.
So enjoy, I guess. Whatever law is passed, you can expect that it will have no impact on anything. The forces that drive people to get something to eat and a place to sleep are ultimately not going to be affected by anything James Sensenbrenner or Bill Frist could imagine or even pay anyone who would work for them to imagine. The important thing to their constitutents is that someone a thousand miles away from their constituents suffer a little more inconvenience because of their (Sensenbrenner and Frist's) works. The important thing in the long run is that everyone can see their futility and hypocrisy.