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Cynical curmudgeon that I am, I have the terrible sinking feeling that we are getting nothing but pre-election ruffles and flourishes from both parties as they jockey for what the pollsters are telling them are "winning" positions. They are talking tougher, but except for grandstand events, are not doing tougher. Troops on the Border! OK. 485 National Guardsmen is "troops on the border?"
The good news is that it looks as if we dodged a Chavez-Castro-Lula-Bolivia-Peru-loony-left megalomaniac bullet in the Mexico election. IMHO, what it means is that economic integration can proceed apace as we try to get Mexico to use its ample resources to turn itself into a real country. Apparently, our unspoken part of the deal remins; i.e., to soak up as much of their population as we can while they right their ship and pump out the holding tank which has spilled into the bilge, and get the good ship Mexico on some kind of rational course.
We may even get border enforcement of some sort, but like that ruptured holding tank that is Mexico, this whole deal is starting to smell worse as our elected officials pretend to work on it.
Pardon the mixed maritime metaphors, but I am working on the boat ... guess what I am repairing.
We need 100 or more clones of JD in Congress, 50 of them in the Senate!
The border should be open, and real immigration reform starts with pressing mexico to give American citiziens or Anglos the right to go to Mexico, and we need to speed up intergration of Mexico into North America economy because Mexico overtime becomes a modern developed ecomony. The others will follow suit, and it would reduce the appeal of the populists in Western Hemisphere. If we had a reciprocal guest worker program with Mexico we could add one to two percent extra growth a year to Mexican ecomony. Therfore, over 30 years the income gap would be reduced assuming a basline of 3% growth a year, and added one to two precent on top of 3% would bring Mexico income level half that of Untied States, and dulled the incentive to try to make it north. In all, Mexico needs skilled workers, and more Legal and adminstrative reform, and putting a fence up is pretty useless because some coyotes and people will hide them into cargo trailers to get them to the Untied States, and they will buy building over the fence and dig a tunnel between the US and Mexico. Illegal immigration is wrong, but Mexicans are gonna come over no matter what type of fine people put on employers for hiring them. Most illegals work for mom and pop construction company, or restuarant with cash in hand.