[lentulusgracchus]

The idea of registering illegal workers who are here AND securing the border to stop the invasion of more AND cutting back on benefits and entitlements to illegals AND tackling Mexico's failures as a nation as a “comprehensive” immigration reform package, is not cynical nor does it cause me despair.

I'm glad to hear it, because that is where the solution lies.

The choice is NOT between “Open borders” ***or*** deportation.

Of course it isn't -- you and the other Perry backers have been the ones suggesting that dichotomy. Of course that choice is a false one. But the right policies, prefigured by Arizona's embattled law, will lead to a massive efflux of Mexican illegals.

Nobody is busting immigrants' chops. The problem is Mexican immigration for reasons that are specific and fourfold:

• First, they are socialists by background and split 70/30 Democrat when they get into a voting booth.

• Second, that voting pattern persists for multiple generations because Mexicans are "culturally conservative": if grandpa voted straight-ticket PRI, even though PRI was corrupt as hell and in bed with the narcos, then PRI is good enough for me.

• Third, Mexicans break wages because their living costs at home are state-subsidized by that selfsame socialism. This is the secret of preferential Mexican employment, mass Mexican immigration, and outsourcing to Mexico: major manufacturers, Big Ag, and all the rest are actually arbitraging a subsidized cost-of-living/cost-of-labor regime in Mexico against an open-outcry market in the U.S. that was partially ameliorated by collective bargaining years ago (there is none in Mexico, only labor bossism and corruption).

Fourthly and lastly, Mexican intellectuals are also major authors of Mexican immigration, and their intentions are historically hostile and revanchist, and their policies toward the U.S., including immigration, monetary, and industrial policy, need to be seen through the prism of historically not-friendly relations, exacerbated now by the determination of the top political circles in Mexico to attempt seizure, through NALEO and the other racist-political Mexican NGO's, of "the catbird seat" of swing political power in the U.S., in order to advance a policy of revanchism and de-Anglicization of North America. It sounds fantastic, but you keep tripping over it in MeChista and Aztlanist literature, and the lines run back to the very top of Mexican society and politics. At some point, you have to stop ignoring it and deal with the problem.

We need to reform our immigration policies overall to exclude culturally hostile and dangerous groups whose members are poor bets for good U.S. citizenship (Moslems, Chinese) and exclude the overrepresented and problematic Mexican immigrant for the next few generations.

Not that other populations' immigration is not also a problem, politically and culturally. But right now Mexico and the Mexican border are The Problem.

The choice is who is going to lead the US into developing a system of foreign worker registration and a realistic path to US citizenship.

No citizenship for Mexican citizens. Not until Mexicans learn to split their votes like Central American and South American immigrants do -- those guys split "about" 50-50, Mexicans do not: and that is why Lyndon Johnson fought for more than 20 years to jam the door open to Mexican immigration, because he knew they'd vote Democratic like the Puerto Ricans do, and form a usable political bloc to shut the Republicans out of the White House for the next 120 years.

People who flunk "plays well with others" don't get to immigrate into the U.S. That is Rule One. And Mexicans fail on the mega scale overview. Sorry, they just do. Nothing personal -- they just vote for the LBJ's of the world, and they don't like people who speak English. We don't need to put up with that.

[muawiyah]

To put that in far simpler terms, the United States acquired vast stretches of New Spain because Spaniards and Spanish interests understood that to be in their own best interests and the interests of the people living there.

You can see that in West Florida, the Louisiana Purchase, and later acquisition of the PAC NW.

Mexicans sought to obtain those same territories themselves and looked on the efforts by Spaniards to become part of the United States as treachery.

I think the Spaniards were correct, and as a consequence the Mexicans have no legitimate right to be here under any guise ~ not even as tourists. That war ain't over ~ and most Americans don't even realize it has been underway for nearly two centuries.