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" I did have to go to Walmart to pick up some camera tape for an inservice. I thought I would just waltz in. The place was packed"

It was the opposite here in South Carolina. There were 30 to 40% fewer people in the store, and it was obvious that the Mexicans so common on Monday nights were nearly absent. It was rather tranquil.

Speaking of Wal Mart, it seems unduly ironic to me that the very people who hate Wal Mart the most are the ones screaming rabidly for immigrant rights. These self-appointed Champions-of-the-Poor hate what Wal Mart does to small retailers and how they are anti-union. Yet Wal Mart's very low prices help the poorest Americans the most. They take no notice of the fact that the unemployment rate among people in the lowest skill level of the legal American labor force (those who failed to finish high school) is 7% whereas the rate among those with more education is much lower (4% or so for high school graduates down to about 2% for college graduates). The difference is obviously due to competition for jobs in that labor class with illegal aliens. The income of college graduates grows, whereas that of high school dropouts barely changes. Again, the result of illegal immigrants competing in the work place. That is the irony: Wal Mart helps the poor citizens and non-citizens, and illegal immigration hurts the poor citizens. Wal Mart has brought down the cost of living for the poor by reducing overhead to a razor-thin margin. At the same time, illegal immigration makes it harder and harder for the poor to get a living wage. With Champions-of-the-poor like that, I suppose the poor do not need enemies.

Back in my days as the most conservative person at Duke University, I once enraged some Euro-leftist by saying Henry Ford did more for the poor than FDR and LBJ combined (I thought he would blow a gasket - it was fun). Ford's developments in manufacturing (e.g. adapting assembly line methods and economies of scale to automobile manufacture) both raised the wage of the average worker (by increasing his productivity) and decreased the cost of his product to the point where average consumers could afford an automobile. Many workers were raised from the poverty of the sweatshop to the middle class by these developments. FDR and LBJ made some poor more comfortable (not necessarily a bad thing), but moved few out of poverty into the middle class. Try that on your favorite leftist. It makes them angry . . . very angry.

If we want to help the poorest workers in the USA, we need to deport at least 5 or 6 million of the illegal aliens here at this time. That would create a labor shortage and increase the wages of the least skilled workers. Mind you it would cause wage inflation and make other problems I would object to. However, I wonder how many of the Champions-of-the-Poor would be willing to do what would be best for the poorest legal workers?