toolpusher: “I still don’t see why the US has an obligation to take care of Mexico’s poor at the expense of our nationals in the bottom two quintiles.”

Nobody in the US has any obligation to take care of Mexico’s poor, whether at the expense of American nationals or not. We’re not talking about whether it’s a good idea to give away tax money to poor people. We’re talking about whether it’s a good idea to attack innocent people for coming here to live peacefully and do work.

“I am really trying hard not to get personal, but I strongly suspect that you do not live in any part of the US with a major illegal alien population.”

I don’t at the moment (I’ve lived in Michigan for the past couple years), but I happen to have been born in San Antonio and spent much of my life in Texas (as well as a short stint in California and about seven years in Florida). I have family in San Antonio, Dallas, and Corpus, among other places. Now what? What has any of this got to do with whether or not it’s justified to attack people for coming here to work?

“The people coming now are not the people coming 30 years ago — they are far more poorly educated,”

Shooting them will not improve their educational opportunities.

“in many cases they don’t like the US and are only here for the money,”

Good for them. I don’t like the US either, and I’m only here for the money, too.

“they don’t want their kids to become Americans,”

Who cares? If they don’t want their kids to become Americans, let them move back with their kids when they’re ready to.

“they want Texas to be more like Mexico because they like it more,”

Most people try to make the place that they live more like places that they like. If it’s too much for you, there are plenty of communities in Idaho where land is cheap.

“they will not hire US nationals (they will not even hire assimilated Mexicans)”

Most Mexican immigrants are not in any position to make hiring decisions at all. As for those that are, well, who said they had any obligation to hire Americans? Not doing so may be foolish, but I’m fairly tolerant of foolishness when I have the option to take my business and my talents elsewhere.

None of this, incidentally, goes at all to show that Mexican immigrants are a net economic burden, or even a net burden on the government budget. (Economic research by Julian Simon and George Borjas has shown that they are neither.)

And none of it has anything to do with whether or not it’s justified to shoot people for coming here to work.

… as “innocent”. That, for example, is gc’s opinion:

gc: ‘I should also note that this border crossing is hardly the “innocent” activity you imagine. Here’s a mirror of the recent TIME magazine article, “Who Left the Door Open?”.

[several nasty activities engaged in by immigrants passing through in order to evade the Border Patrol and La Migra follow]

‘Hmmmm…doesn’t sound so “innocent” any more, does it? Would you like thousands of people per day walking over your lawn, defecating on your property, killing your animals, and cutting your fences?’

But that, of course, is not the issue. As you well know, there are already laws against trespassing, destruction of property, grand larceny, etc. As you also well know, immigration restrictions are enforced against would-be immigrants whether or not they commit any of these crimes, because the purpose of immigration restrictions is to limit the volume of immigration. Simply demanding that the police enforce laws against littering, trespassing, theft, destruction of property, grand larceny, etc., would be enough for you if your only concern were with the fact that some immigrants happen to violate property rights in the course of making their way into the United States.

You would also, of course, recognize and account for the fact that most of these crimes are committed precisely because the immigrants have to dodge armed men who are willing to kill them if necessary in order to stop them from living and working in the United States. If you eliminate those restrictions, you will also eliminate most of the reasons to sneak through, hide, consort with criminals, etc.

If you want to have an intelligent discussion, I strongly suggest you stick to the point rather than introducing red herrings that have nothing to do with the enforcement of immigration law.

Let’s take things a little bit out of order, because one of mac’s first points is more closely connected to gc’s point than to the rest of his argument.

RG: Who cares if we are “integrated”?

mac: “My hand is up. Racially and ethnically balkanized societies tend not to work very well.”

The horror! We might end up like Switzerland, or Belgium!

“Especially when the various population groups differ in their level of economic productivity.”

If you don’t think immigrant farm labor is economically productive, then try picking your own damn tomatoes and see how much you like it. In any case, however, open immigration also means that immigrants will have access to many sectors of the economy (including those that you might think of as “productive”) that they do not now.

In any case, again, at the worst it’s still not worth shooting innocent people over.

RG: Immigrant labor is an economic boon…

mac: “It’s a boon all right… for the immigrants themselves, their relatives back home, and their American employers. For everyone else it is a net bust.”

False. Why do putative Rightists start imbibing economic theory from the AFL-CIO when workers’ skin turns brown?

Using force to prevent people from going to work for an employer at a market wage is not economically productive. It is a wealth transfer, enforced by the government, primarily from those prevented from working to those who hold the jobs. That helps out, e.g., American janitors or computer scientists who can reap artificially inflated wages; but it’s a drain not only on employers and the immigrants forcibly excluded from the jobs, but also on everyone who (for example) buys products from the company that employs the janitors, or software from the company that makes it at an artificially high labor cost.

Government force is destructive, not constructive. Markets work.

And even if they didn’t, it wouldn’t be worth shooting innocent people over.

mac in japan: “Good news, Rad Geek. The authorities do not in fact shoot innocent people for crossing borders. So with your overriding moral concern allayed, you are free to think about this topic consequentially”

Government immigration restrictions are enforced by agents of the law, and enforced without regard to whether or not the targets of the restrictions have trespassed, stolen, assaulted, or otherwise violated anyone’s rights to life, liberty, or property. If you do not believe that innocent people will get shot, beaten, shocked with electricity, or otherwise attacked, up to and including the use of lethal force, then feel free to disregard the orders of an INS or Border Patrol agent and see what happens to you.

(N.B.: I think it’s wrong to beat the shit out of innocent people, too. The specific choice of armaments is not the issue.)

Perhaps your issue isn’t the tactics used, but rather that you don’t think of immigrant workers as

‘That’s a only a “solution” if you are OK with the massive changes it would bring.’

Since I’m not a consequentialist, I think it’s completely immaterial to government policy decisions what changes it will bring. Shooting innocent people for crossing borders to do a job is an injustice, and there is no possible excuse for it.

As for the alleged consequences:

“… more crowded …”

If there is one thing this country has, it’s lots of empty space, and lots of low-density communities. If you don’t like crowded cities, feel free to move to Idaho. In any case, why should the government have a role in forcing people to live further apart or closer together than they normally would choose to?

“… less well integrated …”

Who cares if we are “integrated”?

“… version of present day Brazil, with a similar standard of living …”

There is no good economic reason to believe this. Immigrant labor is an economic boon, and will be that much better for all concerned once it is no longer consigned to the ugly, brutal world of the black market in labor.

“If that is the America you want, then repealing immigration laws is the way to go.”

Again, the America I “want” isn’t the issue here. The issue is whether or not it’s morally acceptable to shoot innocent people for crossing borders in order to do a job. If it’s is, then good God, why? If it isn’t, then you are better off living with whatever consequences come, your vision for America notwithstanding.

Just who do you think is safer as a result of Mr. Bush’s war? Ordinary Americans? Ordinary Iraqis? Har har har.

So by the most conservative estimates at least 10,000 Iraqi civilians are dead. Mr. Bush made the decisions that killed them. For what? Liberty? Safety? Ooops—well, I guess nobody’s perfect.

My favorite was this gem of a comment from “citizensoldier”:

“Gang—this individual will most likely NOT go to jail if a smart military lawyer gets hold of him. His big mistake, along with his comrades was to start talking to the media. Yes he was stressed and had been shot in the face the day before but under the Geneva conventions he is allowed to defend himself. The day prior and even after this specific incident insurgents were blowing themselves up when a soldier came close to tend to their wounds. There were also incidents of boobytrapped bodies……the shooting was totally justified..”

Of course, this reasoning would justify shooting any Iraqi anywhere at any time in cold blood since they “might” have a bomb on them. Kill them all; God will know his own.

“What I find interesting is that both TWIRP and Powder Puff exist to reinforce, not undermine, stereotypical gender roles.”

No doubt—and this is what drives me absolutely up a wall. Over the summers I work as a teacher at CTY, a residential educational program for gifted students (7th-10th grade). Every term there’s a “cross-dressing day”, and it drives me nuts because these are almost all reflective, smart, sensitive young men and women—and for people like that a “cross-dressing day” could be a real teaching opportunity for thinking a bit about what gender is and what gender norms do to women every day. And I think it is actually positive for a lot of the students. But every term there is at least one jerk of a boy—sometimes several—who ruins a perfectly good day by striking up pornographic poses, running around having mock slap-fights, and generally taking every opportunity he can to mock and degrade women. That doesn’t mean I think the day should be banned, of course—least of all because Right-wing twits get uncomfortable at the idea of boys in dresses and girls acting like boys! But it does make me wish I had a manifesto to hand out or a PC indoctrination camp to run people through or something…

toolpusher, you mistake my purpose. The point here is not to offer support either for the bracero program, or for the present situation (which is in some ways not as bad, and in other ways worse, for immigrant workers). Nor is it to suggest that there is some “natural” dependence of agribusiness on immigrant labor: economics is a matter of human choices, not natural forces. I’m well aware of how brutal and exploitative the bracero program allowed some farmers and ranchers to be, and how brutal and exploitative the current immigration regime allows bosses to be towards undocumented workers. (And, often, documented immigrant workers, too.)

The point here is that no-one is served by engaging in economic fabulism, and people who imagine that U.S. agribusiness did NOT make heavy use of immigrant labor prior to 1965—as mac in japan did above—are doing just that. Ever since there has been serious large-scale agribusiness in the United States there it has depended on immigrant labor, and the bracero program was one of the ways that dependency was supplied (for good or ill—and often for ill) during the post war period until 1964. (That some ranchers didn’t like it or use it is beside the point; enough did take advantage of the program to bring millions of Mexican immigrants across the border to live and work in the United States. My family knows it well; my dad spent the summer of 1964 picking tomatoes to help keep his mother’s family’s farm from going under after they could no longer find farmhands.)

I sympathize, and agree with, most of your criticisms of the situation that both the bracero program and the present immigration regime cause. I think that the present situation is shameful, and brutal towards immigrants whose only crime has been to work very hard to make a better life for themselves and their families. But I suspect that we disagree about the economics and the morality of some of the factors in the present situation. I do not think that a large immigrant population from Mexico is a “distortion” of the labor market; I think that the market distortion is the use of government intervention to ban peaceful immigrants from coming to live and work in the country (which, inter alia, gives employers of undocumented immigrants an immense amount of control over them and effectively relegates undocumented immigrants to a few sectors of the economy where the work is typically low-paying and the conditions brutal). Nor do I think there is any sense in blaming La Migra for not being harsh enough towards immigrants; the solution is to repeal the immigration laws, not to enforce them even more.

Well, thanks for taking the time to spread the good word on PGP/GPG encryption. It’s good stuff—and could be a really revolutionary technology if a critical mass of people started using it.

The question is, how? What can we do to promote the idea, and to explain it in terms everyone can get? What can we do to reduce the work involved in getting and using GPG, and to give people a good reason to bother with it?

Enigmail is a good example of a big step in the right direction that I love to death, but of course most people don’t use Thunderbird in the first place. I don’t know. What do you think?

mac in japan finds it “Odd how the fruit always got picked, and the toilets cleaned before 1965, when only Americans were around to do it.”

Think what you will about Mexican immigrants and the work that they do; but this is pure bunk. American agribusiness has always been dependent on immigrant labor; from 1942-1964 that dependency was supplied, in the hundreds of thousands every year, under the bracero program. Braceros lived and worked in the United States for the term of their contract, then returned to their homes in Mexico when the contract expired at the end of the season.

To make accurate economic judgments, you have to start with an accurate accounting of the facts.