Remember, the real problem is “illegal aliens.”
Police said those arrested on Friday were all Canadian residents “of different origins”, most of them citizens - some were students, some employed, others unemployed.
Canada arrests 17 in terror raid, BBC News
On the Newshour a few weeks ago ago, Mark Shields called immigration the gay marriage of 2006:
And whites in this country, 30 percent of whites, want to build a wall tomorrow and they want to deport the 12 million. And if you’re going to energize them in the campaign of 2006, that’s the issue: Immigration is the gay marriage issue of 2006, to get those folks out.
Here’s Glenn Greenwald summarizing the “conservative” response to Bush’s immigration proposals:
I think a lot of the Malkin types have become bored with the whole “War on Terror” business, which provided them good, strong emotional sustenance for the last four years. But September 11 is now almost five years away. There have been no good “battles” for a long time; we don’t even pretend to capture or kill any high-ranking Al Qaeda members any more; and while invocations of “war” will always be good for some blood-rushing excitement, the whole thing seems so distant and abstract at this point. It’s just not enough any more.
They’re also clearly tired of slogging through the political and ethnic complexities of Iraq. That country just doesn’t lend itself to any morally clear good/evil dichotomies. There are no good cartoon villains to hate. Calls for increased “ferocity,” less “sensitive” approaches (”bomb some more mosques!”), and less discriminate bombings can generate some temporary enthusiasm — as it did for a day or so with Shelby Steele’s column — but Iraq is so muddled and ambiguous, and not all that emotionally satisfying. It’s pretty depressing, actually, to think about how everything they said would happen there is not happening, and trying to figure out solutions, ways out, is just not very invigorating stuff for those who thrive on Hating and Warring Against Evil.
As a result, attention gets turned to immigration — Mexican immigration specifically. It entails the opportunity to rail against “appeasement” (of Vincente Fox); to create the anti-terrorist/pro-terrorist dichotomy on which they thrive; and to demonize a clear, foreign enemy as threatening not just our economic prosperity but also our national security (the “Mexican invaders”). And if the weakened, ready-to-be-tossed aside failure, George Bush, is one of the spineless appeasers this time, so be it.
Via Tyler Cowen, Absorption Nation at TCS Daily:
I agree that America’s ability to absorb immigrants has changed: it’s higher today than at any time in history.
Only by naively supposing that a country’s ability to absorb immigrants is determined chiefly by the availability of unsettled land do people conclude that America today is less able to absorb immigrants. It’s true that more land was available for settlement in the 19th century. That land, however, was never much of an attraction to immigrants. Historically, most immigrants settled in cities — think, for example, of Manhattan’s Little Italy and San Francisco’s Chinatown.
And the resources and amenities available in metropolitan areas today are far greater per capita than they were just before Uncle Sam abandoned his open-immigration policy in the 1920s.
Consider that in 1915 the typical dwelling in America housed 5.63 persons; today it houses fewer than half that number — 2.37 persons. Combined with the fact that today’s typical dwelling has about 25 percent more square footage than its counterpart had back then, our ability to absorb immigrants into residential living spaces is today more than twice what it was a century ago.
There’s much more.
I wish I would get more letters.
How did “red hot tamales” get to be a staple of the Mississippi Delta? Southern Foodways Alliance director John T. Edge tells Debbie Elliott that it happened a century ago, when migrant Mexican farmworkers came to pick cotton side by side with African Americans in the deep South.