Mas on immigration

I got a counterargument for the last entry, which you can read in the Comments there. My answer was too long for Comments, so I put it here:

1. Biometric ID: as i said, the time it's most likely to be adopted is in the wake of a catastrophic Islamofascist attack or something comparable.

Think of the widely publicized crimes that give rise to draconian legislation like Jessica's Law and all the other laws with some victim's name in front. Or California's 3 Strikes law.

So it's when the objectors will sound like near traitors who are "soft on terrorism" that it'll be most possible to get biometric ID.

And remember, no one predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall. I'm not saying biometric ID is inevitable or even likely--but it's not impossible, and it's so useful I feel compelled to thump the tub for it.

Also, other countries are trying it, and their success or failure will change the equation as well.

2. Catholic perfidy:

The only third world country I know of with its birthrate under control is peasant China (as opposed to middle class China, which is in many ways another country--as is also true in India).

Catholics and others rail constantly against China's One Child policy, but it's the only thing that works in third world countries. In the rich world, people tend to use the technology regardless of what churches say.

However, even in America it's nearly impossible to get an abortion if you aren't fairly affluent across wide swaths of the country. For example, there's only one abortion clinic in Mississippi--in the whole state--and anyone trying to use it must run a gauntlet of chanting, intimidating protestors.

This is the Catholic Church's fault. Some 19th century pope decided that abortion was wrong--despite the total absence of biblical support for such an idea--and the Church Universal successfully peddled the idea to American Fundamentalists by the 1920s.

Third world Muslims, Christians, Hindus and other have high birthrates. What distinguishes the Catholic Church's contribution to this ecological disaster is its aggressive, top-down, highly successful propaganda campaign enlisting the machinery of the State to enforce its peculiarly non-Christian version of Christianity.

No other religion has so many commanded by so few.

It's easy to discount this if you're a middle class American. You can meet lots of Catholics who, even if they go to Mass regularly, take an a la carte approach to their religion's dictates--including its claim of papal infallibility.

It's not that most of them are marching with placards. They simply go about their business, blithely reshaping their religion in a much milder form of personal practice.

This is also true of most other religions in America--adherents tend to mellow out the harsher stuff.

But outside America's educated urban areas it's another story--and even moreso in the third world.

There the Catholic Church's political engagement and mindlock on uneducated adherents is staggering. Only the evangelicals have been able to put much of a dent in it, but they share the Catholic's ecocidal attitude toward abortion, though not, thank heavens (so to speak) condoms.

There is no comparable head of the Muslim or Hindu faiths. Thus you'll get ingnorant African Muslim clerics responsible for the resurgence of polio there, but that didn't come from Mecca.

So my particular brief against the Catholic Church centers on its political activism and efficacy combined with the most backward view of birth control of any religion on Earth. Condoms are murder? Really?

3. Blocking illegals' access to social services.

This would only be possible with biometric ID AND with a major economic downturn, such that people felt like the aid for them was being taken out of American mouths.

So the longer this recession goes on the more pressure will build to take care of our own first.

However, the other part of the equation--blocking access to jobs--has broad popular support, despite some right wing opposition to e-Verify from Libertarians whose secular religion opposes all forms of government control (thus enabling corporate control) over our lives.

And in fact you can get majorities opposing most social services for illegals in most states. The problem is the opposition to this opposition by both parties.

So, as with biometric ID, this area's equations will change if/when our society gets really stressed.

And here again I'm not hearing the arguments I make--we have to pound on the plain fact that there is no job magnet sufficient to tear most Mexicans away from home and hearth--it's Mexican overpopulation that's pushing them up here.

So our foreign aid to Mexico should be in the form of free family planning clinics throughout rural Mexico.

I know, fat chance. Had to be said though.

It all does seem like long odds. The game is worth the candle though (whatever that means).