The US could stop illegal immigration tomorrow if it wanted to. We went to the moon, don’t tell me we can’t build a fence stretching from TJ to Matamoros. But we won’t stop it because the business interests that control this country don’t want it stopped. They are addicted to cheap labor; illegals don’t usually organize and they’re usually (not always though) afraid to go to the authorities to complain about unsafe work conditions, unpaid overtime, or on-the-job injuries for fear of being sent home.
The political parties trot out “solutions” every few years to make you think they’re doing something — tough new border controls and partial fences to please the anti-immigrant crowd (and put dollars in the DHS coffers), and amnesty and visa ploys to please the pro-immigrant crowd. But in the end nothing changes.
The Republicans are particulary disingenous about this, and are the masters of playing to both sides. They get Sensebrenner (from Wisconsin, not a lot of Rodriguez’s in the phonebooks there) to talk tough about building new fences or hiring more DHS officers while at the same time Dubya (Texas) and Dubya’s Bubba Jeb (Florida) are speaking Spanish and talking about guestworker programs and amnesty. So everyone thinks that the Republicans have the right answer, because they have every answer!
Of course, the blame for the explosive growth in illegal immigration rests with Clinton and the NAFTA crew — NAFTA put all of those Mexican farmworkers out of work almost overnight as Mexico was flooded with cheap agricultural products from giant US factory farms. They went from the 1920s to the 1990s overnight and, like the Okie sharecroppers forced off of their land in the depression, they made their way anywhere they could find work. It’s the biggest Northbound migration since the 1910 Mexican revolution, when almost a million Mexicans came to the US at a time when our population was only 90M.
