Response to yet another NYTmes diatribe about immigration

For the editorial board of the New York Times, illegal immigration is an ideological issue. For those of us who live in the border states it's an everyday in-your-face reality. My state--California--now ranks 48th among states educationally, as a direct result of our schools being flooded with the children of Mexican peasants, a majority of whom drop out before graduation. Our ERs are stuffed with same. Transnational criminal gangs have turned California's prisons into a battleground, while their compadres out on the streets are racially cleansing mixed neighborhoods of blacks.

You call us nativist and restrictionist. I call you isolated, arrogant, full of condescending advice about a reality you've never dealt with. Manhattan is a melting pot where "immigration" means great restaurants with cuisines from all over the world. In the border states it means the formation of a monolithic ethnic enclave comparable to Canada's thorn-in-its side Quebec. Today the most-watched TV station in LA broadcasts only in Spanish, and the Mexican flag decorates innumerable bumpers and back windows.

Nowhere in your hyperbolic editorial did you address the fact that business interests have exploited illegal aliens' labor to drive down blue-collar wages for everyone 15-25%. But I suppose poor whites and blacks--and Hispanic citizens, for that matter--are yesterday's news.

Worst of all, your editorial radiates a smug moral certainty also characteristic of the pronouncements of, say, fundamentalist Christians here or Wahhabist Muslims in the Middle East.

You treat our defense of our society, our culture, our very safety as so contemptible you need to do little more than label us "nativist" and get back to your morning latte.

There are positions that don't deserve respectful disagreement, to be sure. Creationism, for example. All the Creationists' anti-evolution arguments are complete nonsense, and the more scientific terms they use the more nonsensical they get.

So I'm not saying you should treat the two-thirds of Americans who oppose illegal immigration with respect just because. But your arguments and refutations demonstrate the shallowness of your approach. In this you exemplify Saul Steinberg's famous cartoon of the USA as seen though New Yorkers' eyes. You are parochials pretending to be sophisticates.

And the Democrats' candidates all say exactly the same thing as you do. Didn't you notice Barack Obama's extended refutation of the "deport them all" stance that no one has taken (that's called a Straw Man argument)? Didn't you notice Senator Clinton stating "No woman is illegal," then adding that no man is either? Is that what you'd say about the Saudi airplane bombers who were here illegally?

What you dismiss as "restrictionist" works just fine. If I have ants in my kitchen, I have to not leave food out. Then they go away. A majority of illegal aliens will self-deport if we make it impossible for them to earn money here--and to send money back to Mexico.

In your exegesis you failed to mention that you want America to pay for the Mexican government's exploitation of its people and the Catholic Church's domination of social policy there, resulting in Mexico's population exploding from 20 million in 1940 to over 100 million today--vastly more people than its economy can absorb.

How is America at fault for this? It's Mexico's kleptocracy and the 14th century attitude of its dominant religion that produced the population bomb Mexico desperately wants to deposit on our doorstep.

Meanwhile we erect a near-endless wait for the grad students and skilled professionals who want to live and work here, and the million Iraqi Christians our policies have deprived of home and country. Them we could use. More peasants we don't need. All they help is big business in its endless war on the working class--abetted by Volvo liberals like yourselves.

"We" didn't invite these illegal aliens here. Wealthy corporatists did, then outsourced their massive social burden to the taxpayer, while insourcing the profits of their cheap, uncomplaining labor to themselves.

How can you shill for the greedy plutocrats you oppose in every other editorial? How can you urge the Democratic Party to further alienate itself from its traditional base of working-class Americans of every race and ethnicity in your passion for Mexico's citizenry?

I could be like you. Heck, I speak Spanish. I've lived in Mexico. I'm comfortable in that culture. And I live in an affluent college town that isn't being inundated by illegals. What's happening affects me very little--just like you. But unlike you I care about Americans who don't have my advantages.

The New York Times publishing a science section article showing how partisans of the left and right don't process political information with the reasoning part of their brains. You should look up that article, then do some serious introspection.