Latin America Loses a Friend

The Wall Street Journal ^ | Friday, January 2, 2004 | MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY

[presidio9]

The Dec. 6 passing of Robert L. Bartley, The Wall Street Journal's editor emeritus, has been widely recognized as a monumental loss of American intellectual firepower on behalf of free men and free markets. What has been less well recognized is what Latin America has lost, in a friend, a visionary and an intellectual force who viewed the region with undying optimism. It is a record worth revisiting.

[livius]

I was out of town (and out of touch) for a while and didn't realize that Bartley had died. Thanks for posting.

Mary Anastasia O'Grady is a wonderful, informed writer on Latin America, and I hope she continues her columns in the Journal for many years.

[Sabertooth]

Bartley viewed Mexican workers, hungry for opportunity and ready to work, as an asset to the American economy. When the Clinton administration, with strong support from Republican nativists, went to work on a Berlinesque wall on the Califorina border, Bartley worried that the migrants would shift their routes into the desert and the number of deaths from exposure would grow. Indeed, that is precisely what happened.

Bartley had no illusions about the faults of Mexico's 70-year-old one-party system. But he also recognized that an evolution was underway. He saw the 1968 massacre of protesting students at Tlatelolco as Mexico's Tiananmen Square. He fully expected the economic liberalization of the Salinas government to stir a political transformation, and it did.

An integrated North America was coming, whether cultural protectionists wanted it or not. Bartley put his efforts into establishing the right fundamentals.

Illegal Aliens lost a mole.

[presidio9]

George Melloan on Robert Bartley

Daniel Henninger on Bartley

[livius]

Thanks for the references. Bartley was one impressive person.

[presidio9]

An integrated North America was coming, whether cultural protectionists wanted it or not.

[norton]

An integrated North America was coming, whether cultural protectionists wanted it or not.

Good,
Buy them bus tickets to Canada.

[presidio9]

Good, buy them bus tickets to Canada.

That's not the solution. The solution is welfare reform. Illiterate Mexicans who can't speak english are coming to this country specifically because the welfare class refuses menial labor.

[Pelham]

Translate "Bartley" into espanol, it comes out "Quisling."

[Pelham]

Right. Why should mere citizens have a say in how their country changes?

[norton]

Sorry, but society does evolve; absent those illiterate alien excuses, 'menial' jobs might pay better and we could concentrate on welfare reform instead of amnesty provision.
If there are fewer wetbacks to rake your lawn, you might benefit from some exercise.
If there are fewer wetbacks packing Tyson's chicken tenders, Tyson might become more efficient.
Besides, I've known too many US born folks who have taken menial jobs not yet sucked up by mexicans and done OK with them.
And,
finally, you are staking the merits of illegal immigration on jobs that, as you define them, cost more in still required welfare than they contribute to the tax base.

[norton]

PS:
Canada is part of NAFTA.
That was my point.

[presidio9]

wetbacks

Thankyou for openly revealing your racist motivations. Usually I have to draw a dishonest protectionist out.

[norton]

Wetback is not a race.
It is a state of being.

Mexican is not a race.
It is a description of persons in or from an immediately proximate nation that resolves several pesky social issues by exporting them to the USA, which is likewise a nation and not a race.

There is a river in between mexico and the USA.

My next door neighbor is an American descended from mexican parents, others from Guatemala, Illinois, and Samoa.
None of those is a specific 'race' although the Samoan might protest.

You don't take much 'drawing out' yourself; try to get over your personal issues and deal with the larger ones; like governmental willingness to ignore basic laws of our country to make life easier on a neighbor's greedy and inept elites.

Always in favor of open discussion.

[presidio9]

Semantical points notwithstanding, ethinic slurs are (for lack of a better term) racist. Your opinions are born out of bigotry, therefore open discussion with you is pointless.