Reason Magazine - Topics > Mexico

The Anti-Emo Pogroms

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 11:06:00 EDT

Mexican subcultures go to war:

In recent weeks, a wave of emo bashings has swept across Mexico, several news agencies have reported, fuelled by punks, rockabillies, goths, metalheads and basically anyone who's not emo.

According to Daniel Hernandez, who's been covering the anti-emo riots on his blog Intersections, the violence began March 7, when an estimated 800 young people poured into the Mexican city of Queretaro's main plaza "hunting" for emo kids to pummel. Then the following weekend similar violence occurred in Mexico City at the Glorieta de Insurgents, a central gathering space for emos. Hernandez also reports that several anti-emo riots have now also spread to various other Mexican cities. Via the Austin American Statesmen, several postings on Mexican social-networking sites, primarily organising spot for these "emo hunts," have been dug up and translated. One states: "I HATE EMOS!!! They are not even people, they are so stupid, they cry over meaningless things... My school is infested with them, I want to kill them all!"...

More recent reports state that the emos have begun to fight back against the other "urban tribes" and organised marches in Guadalajara and Mexico City, escalating the violence and leading to increased police presence.

Hat tip: Charles Oliver, who adds: "This would have made a great movie in the hands of Walter Hill around 1978." It sounds more like a joint project for Todd Haynes and Sam Peckinpah to me.

Insane Musings on the Future

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 16:30:00 EST

reason Senior Editor Kerry Howley recently sat down The American Scene's Reihan Salam for wide-ranging conversation about Hillary Clinton and feminism, the politics of fertility, the brain-draining effects of liberal immigration policies, and much more.

Click below to check out the conversation.

Discuss this video at reason's Hit & Run Blog.

Gun Control That Works

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 16:37:00 EST

Well, sort of. Apparently, so many Tijuana cops are involved with violent drug-trafficking gangs that the whole force has temporarily been stripped of its arms. The Los Angeles Times reports:

Tijuana, a sprawling metropolis of about 1.5 million people, was bustling as usual Friday, and there were no signs of social unrest or public disorder two days after more than 3,500 soldiers and federal agents starting arriving as part of Operation Tijuana.

Members of the 2,300-strong municipal police force were ordered by the military to turn in their weapons to see whether any are linked with homicides and other crimes. More than 2,000 weapons, most of them 9 mm handguns, but also some automatic weapons and shotguns, are being inspected.

Mayor Jorge Hank Rhon said in an interview that he had feared putting unarmed police at risk and had ordered them off the streets Thursday after receiving assurances from the general in charge of Operation Tijuana, Hector Sanchez Gutierrez, that his troops would maintain order.

The 18 hours without municipal police went without any major incidents, though there were some complaints of no law enforcement response to a few minor traffic accidents. And at the jail holding facility in the red light district, Municipal Judge Oscar Gonzalez Valdez said he had freed some detainees - mostly drinking-related offenders - because there were no transit police to take them to the main jail across the city.

Municipal police may get their weapons back within two weeks, Tijuana officials say, but many residents aren't demanding urgent action.

I'm not wild for the idea of troops acting as police, but I understand the frustrations that led there. Of course, if the military took over patrol duties permanently, the soldiers would soon face the same corrupting incentives as the ordinary police. That's how the drug war works.

The best quote in the story comes from a 55-year-old Tijuanan: "I bet the number of assaults goes down until the police get their guns back. I feel pretty safe right now."

Drug War Update, Mexican Division: Drugs Still Winning

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 14:16:00 EST

Wow, just when I thought the war on drugs couldn't get any more futile, this from the Associated Press:

Soldiers trying to seize control of one Mexico's top drug-producing regions found the countryside teeming with a new hybrid marijuana plant that can be cultivated year-round and cannot be killed with pesticides.

Soldiers fanned out across some of the new fields Tuesday, pulling up plants by the root and burning them, as helicopter gunships clattered overhead to give them cover from a raging drug war in the western state of Michoacan. The plants' roots survive if they are doused with herbicide, said army Gen. Manuel Garcia.
"These plants have been genetically improved," he told a handful of journalists allowed to accompany soldiers on a daylong raid of some 70 marijuana fields. "Before we could cut the plant and destroy it, but this plant will come back to life unless it's taken out by the roots."
The new plants, known as "Colombians," mature in about two months and can be planted at any time of year, meaning authorities will no longer be able to time raids to coincide with twice-yearly harvests.
The hybrid first appeared in Mexico two years ago but has become the plant of choice for drug traffickers Michoacan, a remote mountainous region that lends to itself to drug production.

Yields are so high that traffickers can now produce as much marijuana on a plot the size of a football field as they used to harvest in 10 to 12 acres. That makes for smaller, harder-to-detect fields...

Toward the end of the article, another lovely sign of what good the war on drugs does for domestic peace and tranquility:

[Former Mexican President Vicente] Fox boasted that his administration had destroyed 43,900 acres of marijuana and poppy plantations in its first six months and more than tripled drug seizures.
Yet drug violence has spiked across the country in recent years, with gangs fighting over control of routes following the arrest of drug lords, authorities say.
Mexico has also continued to struggle with corruption among its law enforcement ranks. Garcia said authorities did not tell soldiers where they were being sent on raids and banned the use of cell phones and radios.

Earlier this year there was a brief and aborted fooferaw about Mexico possibly loosening some of its drug possesion laws, which I wrote about in the LA Times. They should really think of revisiting that eminently sensible idea, extend it to sales as well, and say goodbye to the endless, violent, hopeless task of keeping people from substances they want to consume.

Adios, Presidente

david.agren@gmail.com (David Agren) — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 03:05:00 EST

Cantina owner Ramon Garcia once held high hopes for Mexican President Vicente Fox. He supported Fox not once but three times, as Fox previously ran for governor in Garcia's home state of Guanajuato before successfully deposing the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in 2000. But with time, Garcia, like many Mexicans, grew disillusioned as Fox repeatedly stumbled and failed to implement much of the change promised during the heady days of his presidential campaign.

"He wasn't born dumb," Garcia commented, before adding, "Fox just never knew how to be president."

Garcia pointed to his ailing San Miguel de Allende bar business as proof of Fox's unfulfilled promises of creating prosperity. He said his clientele, mostly working-class folk from nearby barrios and surrounding ranchos, lacks the purchasing power of past years. Good jobs are still scarce.

Fox left office on Friday after six stable but unremarkable years of governance – if you don't account the early accomplishment of outsting the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and improving the macroeconomic climate. Despite running on an agenda of change, much of the old Mexico he promised to banish stubbornly persists, perhaps nowhere more visibly than in Oaxaca, where a teachers' strike descended into a battle between disgruntled leftists and the state's corrupt PRI governor. Inaction, a failure to broker deals with a divided Congress and a tendency to avoid conflict will no doubt go down as some of his biggest shortcomings. But many of Fox's problems stemmed from the high expectations created by his presidential campaign.

"He was an imprudent president incapable of biting his tongue,” said Marco Antonio Cortes, director of the political science department at the University of Guadalajara.

A gifted campaigner and lousy politician, the former Coca-Cola executive effectively turned the 2000 presidential race into a referendum on 71 years of PRI rule, coining the slogan, “¡Ya!” (loosely translated: now, or enough). He also was all things to all people and in the euphoria of seeing the PRI unseated – a feat compared to landing a man on the moon – pretty much anything he said seemed possible. Governing, however, proved more difficult than winning office.

"Fox never had a serious plan for governing,” said Dan Lund, president of Mund Americas, a Mexico City market research firm. Almost from the start, “There was a sense of drift that began to set in.”

Opposition lawmakers immediately seized on the president's poor political instincts and unwillingness to wield power like his predecessors. Much of Fox's agenda got bogged down in legislative gridlock. He quickly became a lame duck president.

His unwillingness to act decisively extended beyond partisan politics as he repeatedly backed down from confrontations. In 2002, he abandoned plans for a new Mexico City airport after machete-wielding campesinos refused to cooperate. Left-leaning presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador shut down central Mexico City for six weeks over the summer to protest alleged election fraud. Fox later fled the capital during the fiestas patrias (national holidays) rather than confront Lopez Obrador supporters camped outside of the traditional spot the president delivers the grito (the annual reenactment of Miguel Hidalgo's 1810 shout for independence). The Oaxaca conflict simmered for months, but Fox refused to send in the federal police until an American activist/journalist was shot dead in late October.

Perhaps most infamously, Fox said he'd resolve the Chiapas crisis in 15 minutes. Six years later it's still unresolved, although jungle-dwelling rebel subcomandante Marcos is now a peripheral figure, better loved by foreign lefties than Mexicans outside of Chiapas.

Economically the country stagnated, although 2006 has been promising in terms of job creation. Growth averaged just 2.5 percent annually during the Fox years – a far cry from the seven percent promised. Migrants still decamp the campo (countryside) in large numbers. (The president promised to achieve an immigration deal with the United States, but 9/11 derailed those hopes.) Fox spoke of job creation, but the informal economy is as robust as ever. Monopolies and duopolies – most notably in telecommunications, broadcasting and brewing – still gouge Mexican consumers. Pemex, the state-owned oil company, is sorely lacking investment. Unions wield as much power as ever.

"We've got more macroeconomic stability, but that's all we've got,” Lund said.

Monopolies and privileges are braking – if not absolutely impeding – economic growth.”

Still, some of the macroeconomic figures are impressive. Inflation dipped below three percent, banks now issue fixed-interest rate loans, the peso failed to crash and the stock market tripled. Fox also drove down the budget deficit.

"He deserves credit, but not all of the credit that's been attributed to him,” said Marco Antonio Cortes. "He's been lucky.”

High oil prices swelled profits at Pemex, the government's main cash cow. (The company remits more than 60 percent of its gross income to the Mexican government, leaving little cash for exploration or maintenance.) Remittances from Mexicans abroad also accelerated, going from less than $10 billion in 2002 to a projected $24 billion in 2006.

Stability aside, Cortes remarked, "(Fox) hasn't achieved any of his important projects."

But that didn't stop the president from returning to what he did best: campaigning. Los Pinos (the presidency) aired an endless stream of TV and radio commercials and erected signs along many of the Republic's major highways boasting of the “Gobierno de Cambio” (government of change). Many Mexicans didn't believe it, but Fox remained somewhat popular. The propaganda, though, confused the residents of one Veracruz hamlet, who changed their town's name to Licenciado Vicente Fox Quesada in a bid to avoid missing out on the supposed largess flowing from Los Pinos. (More importantly for one resident commenting in Mexico City newspaper El Universal: “Most of the town is illiterate and this is one of the few names everyone could remember.”)

Fox's successor, Felipe Calderon, also spoke of change and made numerous promises during the 2006 presidential race. Unlike Fox, many analysts, including Cortes, give Calderon a better chance of succeeding.

"(Calderon's) intelligent, an able negotiator (and) much more prudent," Cortes said.

Perhaps more importantly, "He thinks a lot more prior to opening his mouth."

David Agren is a freelance journalist living in Guadalajara.

Turning Right or Running in Place?

david.agren@gmail.com (David Agren) — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 13:34:00 EDT

When asked whom she voted for in the Mexican presidential election, Marcela Armenta, a marketing assistant in Guadalajara, answered "The least worst option." That was an opinion voiced by many last Sunday.

Six years after Vicente Fox, running on an agenda of change, ousted the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), Mexicans returned to the polls to face a stark choice: gamble on a left-leaning populist, pitching outdated economic proposals and a revival of the PRI corporatist system, or stick with the unremarkable governance and macroeconomic stability ushered in by Fox's conservative National Action Party (PAN).

Mexican voters have apparently opted for the latter, choosing the PAN's Felipe Calderon, a drab, Harvard-educated lawyer with a thin resume. (Fox was barred from seeking reelection).

"The PRI is a bunch of rats... the (Democratic Revolution Party) PRD is leftwing and is going to cause economic instability similar to Venezuela," she said.

After more than six months of nasty campaigning, which saw the PAN liken PRD candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and skeletons tumble out of the supposedly clean PAN candidate's closet, the election ended with the two main contenders less than one percentage point apart. After a recount of the polling station results on Wednesday and Thursday, Calderon bested Lopez Obrador by a scant 0.6-percentage-point margin.

Lopez Obrador, the former mayor of Mexico City, screamed foul, alleging manipulation. He promised to appeal to an election tribunal and also beckoned his supporters to Mexico City's main square for a rally on Saturday night.

A man with a persecution complex, who frequently speaks of conspiracies against him, Lopez Obrador has had his run-ins with voter fraud. His PRD predecessor Cuauhtemoc Cardenas lost the 1988 election after a mysterious computer crash wiped out the early results. Lopez Obrador later lost a scandal-plagued governor's race in Tabasco state in which his PRI opponent allegedly spent more than 40 times the legal limit.

But this time around the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) oversaw the election. It's well funded, professional and transparent. Even Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, with every reason to be bitter, called the IFE "trustworthy."

Lopez Obrador's combative behavior failed to surprise many observers, including George Grayson, a government professor at the College of William and Mary, who penned a book on the PRD candidate titled, Mesias Mexicano (Mexican Messiah).

Grayson writes in an email, "As a man with messianic tendencies, Lopez Obrador believes that he incarnates the will of the people. Thus he could not have lost; there had to be fraud."

Although Lopez Obrador was widely viewed as the left's best hope to capture power since 1988, his ascension unsettled several small but significant players—most notably pipe-smoking bandit Subcomandante Marcos and Alternativa candidate Patricia Mercado, who presented her minor party as a responsible alternative to the PRD.

Mercado accused the PRD of engaging in the old PRI practice of establishing clientelas, constituencies dependent on favors, highlighting Lopez Obrador's system of giving stipends to seniors in Mexico City as an example.

Many PRI operatives and PRI-affiliated unions drifted over to the PRD as the PRI campaign stumbled. The PRI failed to win a majority in any state, even in the backwards southern enclaves, where its fabled party machine was rumored to have all its gears grinding.

Lopez Obrador drew on the PRI's inglorious past for many of his economic proposals, which included lowering the prices of gasoline and electricity, keeping foreigners out of the energy sector, withdrawing from parts of NAFTA and boosting household incomes. But as Grupo Reforma columnist Sergio Sarmiento, a skeptic of Lopez Obrador's plan to boost incomes of families earning less than 9,000 pesos per month by 20 percent, observed, "The last time we had something like this was in 1982, when [former president] Jose Lopez Portillo ordered a 30 percent increase in salaries, which produced a subsequent economic collapse."

Felipe Calderon, a former energy secretary, eventually stooped to similar demagoguery, promising lower electricity and gasoline prices too. Mostly though, he spoke of modernizing Mexico and railed against Lopez Obrador.

Despite President Vicente Fox's inability to enact necessary tax, energy or labor reforms, Mexico's economy improved on several fronts. Inflation dropped below three percent, interest rates also fell Mexicans can now get fixed-rate loans—the stock market soared and the peso remained stable. Calderon polled well among the middle classes, who tired of recurring economic crises.

Fox, a lousy politician, fell short of his goals thanks in part to intransigent legislators, who refused to go along with his reforms. Calderon, assuming he takes office, will have to deal with a divided Congress and Senate, where no party holds a majority.

Recognizing his slim victory and lack of a strong mandate (he only captured 35.9 percent of the vote, the lowest winning number in modern Mexican history) Calderon promised to form a coalition government. With any luck it might pull Mexico out of legislative gridlock and end its seemingly endless mediocrity.

America's Criminal Immigration Policy

info@reason.com (Jesse James DeConto) — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 00:00:00 EST

In the wee hours of a Tuesday morning in December 2004, Buca's daughters, 10-year-old Darby and 4-year-old Daisy, reached up from their bed, hugged their daddy, and went back to sleep. Outside their back window, the sun was still waiting to cross the distant cattle pastures that rise up from the far bank of the New River valley, far below their mountaintop home in Ashe County, North Carolina. Buca (whose surname I am omitting to protect his family's identity) was among thousands of Mexican men flowing south from the Blue Ridge Mountains in the weeks before Christmas. The girls would not see him again until February.

Like a nativity set missing a figurine, this scene recurs almost every year. Five thousand of their very own Christmas trees grow around their home, right there next to the girls' trampoline and swing set, yet the Mexican border, 1,500 miles away, manages to divide the family at Christmas time. To comply with federal law, Buca must return to his native Veracruz, in southern Mexico, and renew his H-2A temporary guest worker visa or risk losing it and drawing up to $10,000 in fines for his employer. Except for one year, when he decided he couldn't afford it, Buca has made this trip every winter since December 2000. His wife, Amanda, remains in the North Carolina mountains illegally with their daughters, refusing to endure another dangerous border crossing on the return trip north.

At 35, Buca is a crew leader on a large commercial Christmas tree farm, helping his employers harvest more than 30,000 Fraser firs a year from an inventory of about half a million spread across three counties in North Carolina and southwest Virginia. The state of North Carolina exports about 5 million Fraser firs every year, or one out of every five Christmas trees sold in the United States. Buca's family fragmentation is common: Permanent resident green cards, even for parents of American citizens such as Darby and Daisy, are scarce (just over 700,000 were handed out in fiscal year 2003), and H-2A agricultural visas are for individual farm workers, not their families.

Buca is technically a "nonimmigrant worker" because his visa allows him to stay only as long as the Christmas tree growing season lasts, February through December. Amanda works as a nanny for the daughter and son-in-law of a local Baptist leader she met at church. She is ineligible for her husband's H-2A temporary agricultural visa. More than half of all U.S. farm workers have no legal working status at all. Most are men who cross the border with other men, looking for work to provide for their families. They raise your turkey in Minnesota, dig your potatoes in Idaho, pick your corn in Illinois, and scoop your cranberries from a Massachusetts bog. A good portion of their paychecks gets wired back to Guanajuato or Chiapas, so mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, wives, and children can buy some meat, or books for school.

The agricultural, construction, and service industries have come to depend on these immigrants, yet the avenues for citizenship and full membership in American society are so narrow as to be closed completely for most foreign workers. More than 10 million illegals contribute the labor without which American society as we know it would stall, but unless the current immigration limits expand, our government will not recognize them as Americans. Legislators of both parties have proposed a plan to put illegal immigrants on a road to citizenship. Unless Congress approves it, men will continue to leave their families behind and risk their lives to improve them.

Some, like Buca, will manage to bring their families with them. They'll become our friends, neighbors, and community volunteers. But they won't be Americans.

I met Amanda and Buca in November 2004 at a Hispanic Baptist mission in rural Ashe County, population 25,000, which has seen its Hispanic population swell to at least 3,000 during recent fall harvests, just 20 years removed from when the area was almost exclusively white. Amanda greeted me, the only gringo in the pews, in English. It was in my language that we got to know each other, over tamales at a Latino center fundraiser, turkey and refried beans at a church-sponsored Thanksgiving dinner for migrant Christmas tree workers, and, eventually, over dozens of meals around Buca and Amanda's kitchen table.

Barbie, Christmas Trees, and Sweet Tea

Buca took me to work with him through the spring and summer. We dug up evergreens for landscapers and garden centers, planted Fraser firs for Christmas 2012, spread fertilizer and pesticides, and trimmed this year's crop into beautiful cones. After more than a decade on the job, Buca has climbed the young man's mountain of proving himself. He's earned the physically easier jobs: driving the tractors and counting the trees as the other guys carry them. If he wants to go home at 5 or 6 o'clock, he goes home, even if his friends are working late. He's got plenty of work to do at home: his own Christmas trees to tend, neighbors' lawns to mow, household maintenance. He lives for his girls. He teases them when they ask if he loves them. He teaches them Bible stories. He canoes with them on the river and goes to their dance and piano recitals.

A liberated yet traditional woman, Amanda learned to drive a car and joined the workforce after immigrating to the United States. She still makes Buca's coffee and packs his lunch every morning, and she's convinced he'd starve if she didn't have his dinner waiting when he got home from work. (In fact, some of his dormitory-dwelling co-workers do skip dinner after 12 hours at work, because they're too tired to cook.) Amanda has occasionally complained to me, only half joking, that she's not as thin as she used to be. But when she smiles with her big brown eyes and high cheek bones, when she laughs at life itself, she makes you feel like you're the most important person in the world.

This sometimes sends the wrong message to men, even Buca's friends. It's not a message a woman wants to send on the migrant trail of lonely men--or in the patriarchal provinces of rural Mexico, where women are often viewed as little more than property. When she and Buca first crossed the border in 1993, an unwelcome suitor tried to kidnap her; she fell from a moving freight train and walked all day with a broken collarbone; a Texas smuggler tried to force her into prostitution; a Florida labor contractor did the same; and the contractor's brother tried to send Buca to North Carolina without her, so he could have her for himself. At the border, Amanda would have to stop being herself, a self-directed American woman.

When I would crash on their couch after our late-night talks three hours from my own home, we'd wake to the sound of the local country music station, with Tim McGraw singing of life on the road, forgotten friends, and the same sort of parental meddling that drove Buca and Amanda out of Veracruz 12 years ago. Buca was 22 when he lost his job at the government-owned Mexican oil company Pemex during a round of layoffs that cut the work force in half. His parents thought Amanda dressed immodestly, and her parents thought he drank too much. With no job prospects in his hometown of Las Choapas, Buca decided to head north to the border, where the foreign-owned maquiladora factories had provided jobs to Mexicans since the 1960s.

He and Amanda had originally intended to stay in Matamoros, opposite Brownsville, Texas, a 27-hour bus ride from home. But Buca couldn't find a job. Amanda went to work at a fast food restaurant, and the pair lived on take-out fried chicken for a few weeks. Then the restaurant owner started hitting on Amanda, still a teenager. He tried to kidnap her as she walked home one night, and she never went back to work. They survived a few days on cash Buca received by donating blood across the border at a Brownsville health clinic. Then they finally headed north for good.

Today they drink Southern sweet tea. (They call it té dulce.) The girls barely speak Spanish, thanks to Amanda's deliberate decision to get an Anglo babysitter. Darby and Daisy, both American citizens, are into pizza, Barbie, and Clifford the Big Red Dog. Darby's cardboard model of the U.S. Capitol was on display for a few weeks at the public library in West Jefferson.

Their gleaming gray trailer, which Buca paints every year, perches on a plateau of manicured grass, surrounded on three sides by the meandering New River 300 feet below. The view from their driveway looks down the river valley some 30 miles into Virginia. Looking left from their front porch, you can see Mount Jefferson, a hazy green backdrop to the verdant cattle pastures and neat rows of Fraser firs dotting hillsides in the foreground. They own this home and a neighborhood lawn-mowing business. A few feet from the back deck, their land drops sharply toward the river. On this mountain slope, Buca and Amanda are growing 3,000 of their own Christmas trees, ready to harvest this year or next. They have 5,000 younger trees on land owned by friends, neighbors, and lawn-mowing clients. They're among an exclusive group of Hispanic Christmas tree workers who are growing their own crop. Eighty percent of North Carolina's Christmas tree workers are Hispanic immigrants, but entrepreneurship is just a dream to most.

"If we don't have papers, we can't [grow our own trees]," an undocumented worker named Csar told me in Spanish. "It's difficult."

In Ashe County, which leads North Carolina with approximately 2,500 workers harvesting a million trees a year, I've been able to identify exactly four other Latinos cultivating their own Fraser firs: Buca's business partner, Gernimo, has 20,000; Gernimo's wife's cousins Jorge and Bonificio have 40,000 between them; and their friend Silvestre leads the way with 55,000, potentially worth more than $1 million when he cuts them in a few years. All of them arrived in the United States illegally in the late 1980s; all became permanent residents under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which provided amnesty for undocumented workers; and all had come by 1991 to North Carolina, where they learned how to care for Christmas trees. By 1998, all were U.S. citizens. But not Buca. By the time he and Amanda came to the United States in 1993, the amnesty provision had expired.

Bienvenidos a Norte Carolina

With snow on the ground in March 1994, Buca and Amanda arrived in North Carolina from a $1-an-hour job in a Florida orange grove. Their new employer put them up in a two-bedroom cabin with five other guys. They had no winter clothes. One of their roommates, Enrique, asked the boss's truck driver, Lionl, to take them to the local swap shop for some sweaters, coats, and boots. The labor contractor who brought them here from Florida was taking $2 an hour out of Buca's $5.50 wage, so after a year another Mexican, Ramiro, helped him get a new job with no middleman, and later sold them their first car.

What's striking, amid the national media's fascination with cultural conflict--zoning battles over Ecuadorian volleyball, Hispanic drunk drivers on the rampage, immigration raids, the Minutemen at the border--is how the local Anglo community has embraced these immigrants. The Hispanic Baptist mission exists because the local association of more than 250 Southern Baptist churches pooled their resources to hire a Mexican pastor; one tree grower donated an old KFC to serve as a sanctuary, and another paid for 350 Spanish Bibles. In Watauga County, to the south, an Episcopal church founded the advocacy group High Country Amigos, which later opened a second branch in Ashe County and serves as a clearinghouse for translation and other immigrant services. In Alleghany County, to the east, a Colombian Baptist pastor and a Catholic doctor opened a low-cost health clinic for uninsured patients, with a team of volunteer interpreters. Grant-funded aid workers also visit the farms to provide medical care and educational supplements to migrant laborers and their families. The Los Arcoiris Mexican Restaurant in Jefferson is usually packed with a mostly Anglo clientele.

In the late 1980s and early '90s, the North Carolina Department of Labor cited a dozen large growers for nearly 100 migrant housing violations. But conditions have improved since then. A few growers and their families are learning Spanish and have traveled to Mexico to understand where their men come from. There are still growers and landlords who will take advantage of the workers' desperate circumstances, but there are also plenty of individuals eager to share their burdens, as Buca and Amanda happily attest.

Marilyn Riehle, a lay missionary with Ashe County's only Catholic church, helped them find their own rental trailer after Amanda, pregnant, fell through the migrant cabin's bathroom floor while washing all the men's laundry in the bathtub. A woman named Robin, among the few Anglos still working the pines, drove her to the county health department for maternity care. Ramiro's boss, whom I won't name because Buca still works for him 10 years later, co-signed on a loan to help the couple buy their own trailer on an acre of land. He also loaned them about 2,000 Fraser fir seedlings and lets them borrow money to get through the winters, when there's little work to do. The boss's father helped Amanda get a job in a local woodshop, where she learned to speak English (which she does well enough to serve as an on-call interpreter for local health care providers and law enforcement). Richard, a next-door neighbor, offered Buca some land on which to plant his seedlings and later gave him a lawn tractor to start a weekend mowing business.

"It just amazes me, how well they've done," says Riehle. "I wish there was some way they could get their papers."

Ashe County Sheriff Jim Hartley also sympathizes with the illegal workers who gravitate to Ashe County, and he doesn't mince words. "I'd probably try to come across that river too," he tells me. "I'd come across, and I'd probably come across the next time too....Personally, I always said, my family or myself's not going to go hungry as long as they put glass in front of supermarkets. When you get so hungry, you do whatever you need to do."

This entire region depends on foreign workers to energize its leading agricultural industry. Growers say there just aren't enough local workers to fill a labor demand that triples during the six-week period from late October to mid-December. In a North Carolina State University survey, farmers told agricultural agent Jim Hamilton they'd have to cut back or go out of business without Mexican labor, and veteran workers like Buca ensure a steady supply, recruiting family and friends and helping them adjust to life in the North Carolina mountains. "If it wasn't for these guys, we wouldn't even be in business," says Buca's boss's father, who started the family farm in 1959.

"We'd shut down. We couldn't do it anymore," says Mark Johnson, foreman at New River Tree Company, a huge operation that has one of the largest Anglo work forces in the area but still relies heavily on immigrant labor. "We used to work guys from Ashe County. It's not a matter of how much you pay them. Nobody wants to do the work. The work's hard. The Mexicans come from [where] everything they do's hard."

"Mexican Burros"

Johnson's farm recruits workers through the North Carolina Growers Association, the largest source of legal immigrant labor in the United States, bringing about 10,000 men each year into North Carolina to cultivate everything from sweet potatoes to tobacco. But these H-2A workers fill only about one in 10 jobs on Christmas tree farms. Most growers find undocumented workers through their colleagues, independent labor contractors, or their own veteran workers who bring friends and family members back from Mexico. Jackie Copeland, a consultant with the North Carolina Employment Security Commission in Ashe County, says Christmas tree growers rarely ask for legal workers through her office, but they're willing to hire local people if they apply.

"We don't have a lot of people that apply to those orders," she says. "You have to be willing to work from dawn to dusk."

During the Christmas tree harvest, the men--and a few women--work 10- to 16-hour shifts. They each carry dozens, sometimes hundreds of trees a day, depending on the size. A man can haul two of the smaller six-foot trees at once, but those exceeding nine feet often require two to five workers to navigate them through the labyrinths of tender trees awaiting future harvests. Even when they team up, the men sometimes need a few minutes to recover after moving each of these grandes, as they call them. Imagine a crew of 20 men moving all the furniture and boxes from a 30-home subdivision in a single day, carrying them and loading them onto trucks parked not in front of each house but every block or two. Then imagine this neighborhood is on the side of a mountain.

The hardest work comes at the end of the day, when the workers are weariest. As a bailing crew operates a machine that ties back the branches, forming the trees into tight cylinders, the workers heave them onto flatbed trailers. The trees pile higher and higher, until some workers are standing on top of a 10- to 12-foot pile and tugging on the tops of the trees while others are pushing from below. The trailers haul the trees to storage and loading areas, where the workers reverse the process, leaning the trees against each other inside rope corrals. There, the trees wait for commercial truckers to pick them up.

Once the semis come to collect the trees, the workers use similar teamwork, as one set of men waits inside a trailer while another group sends the trees upward along a mechanized conveyor belt. They work without stopping, sometimes stumbling under the weight of the grandes, until hundreds of trees fill each truck. Crews of about 10 workers load up to a dozen trucks in one day, then wake up the next morning with sore arms, shoulders, backs, and legs, only to do it all over again, every day for five to six weeks. Pay ranges from $6 to $8 an hour for the typical worker.

"Americans don't do this work," says Buca's longtime friend and co-worker Julin, in Spanish. "It's for the Mexican burros."

Ashe County native Kevin Dishman, 22, worked the 2002 Christmas tree harvest. "Ain't never bothered with it again," he said as he waited to file an unemployment claim last January. He'd injured his wrist at a poultry processing plant in nearby Wilkesboro, a job with a base pay of $9.25 an hour plus bonuses. There he had to catch several six-pound live chickens in each hand and carry them upside down by their legs, two between his thumb and forefinger and one between each of the other fingers. He'd do this over and over again, all day.

"It's rough, but it still ain't as bad as the trees," he said. "Pine tree work is harder than catching chickens because of all the lifting that you've got to do."

With so few local people willing to harvest Christmas trees, growers have to rely on migrants who come from tobacco fields in the Carolinas or orange groves in Florida. Out of more than 3,000 Hispanics who live in Ashe County at some point during the Christmas tree growing season, fewer than 1,000 belong to intact families who stay here year-round. About two-thirds of North Carolina's Christmas tree workers are migrant men who come alone for late summer shearing or the fall harvest, leaving wives and children, mothers and fathers back in Mexico to wait for their pay-phone calls and wire transfers. The men live barracks-style, sleeping two or three to a bedroom, with a few more in the living room of a dormitory, trailer, apartment, or old farmhouse. These workers are vital to one of the region's leading industries, yet the current immigration system, the subject of a protracted debate in Washington, keeps their families apart. The H-2A program does not allow workers to bring their families, and as Amanda's story shows, crossing illegally with women and children is often too dangerous. So the men come alone.

Just when many of the migrants are reuniting with their wives and children for the winter break back in Mexico, Buca is leaving his. Last year, Buca's employer offered to falsify a guest-worker contract so Amanda could go with him, but she was afraid something would go wrong, leaving her stuck in Mexico while her daughters live the only life they know in the United States. "I won't do it," she says. "She's afraid she's never going to see [the girls] again," says Buca.

Separation

In 2003 Amanda's younger brother Jorge, 20, came to work on the commercial farm with Buca, but the girls have never met their 13 other aunts and uncles and numerous cousins who still live in Mexico. Part of Amanda's wages go to pay medical bills for her elderly father, stricken with malignant lymphoma. She hasn't seen him since leaving Las Choapas, Veracruz, on June 29, 1993. I visited the family the day after Buca came home in February 2005. As he told us of the mangos and oranges dangling from trees in his parents' backyard, and of his nieces and nephews who sleep on the floor because their parents can't afford furniture, I could see the wheels spinning inside Darby's head. "I've never seen my grandparents," she said simply. Their retired neighbors, Miss Barbara and Mr. H, fill the role of Grandma and Grandpa.

Before the spring of 1998, Buca brought his sister Laura and her husband, Lucio, across the border to work on the farm in North Carolina. After two nights of walking to rendezvous with a human smuggler beyond an immigration checkpoint in Falfurrias, Texas, they encountered a group of 80 male migrants with their own coyote. Lucio was afraid someone among the men might try to rape or kidnap his wife, as sometimes happens in the desperate borderlands. They forfeited their food and water to avoid a conflict. Two years later, the boss sent the men back to Mexico to apply for H-2A work visas. Now Lucio and Buca travel alone to Mexico to renew their H-2A contracts almost every winter, leaving their families behind just as most Christmas tree workers return to theirs in Mexico. The H-2A program is intended for seasonal jobs that last no more than 10 months, aligning perfectly with the Christmas tree growing season but forcing even assimilated immigrants like Buca to return to their native countries from mid-December to mid-February.

"It's too long to stay over there," Buca told me last summer, as he dreaded another winter away from his family. In December 2004, after his crew loaded the last Christmas tree that would bring some American family together, Buca's split apart. His boss has tried three times to obtain green cards for him and Lucio, to no avail.

"I'd love to find a good attorney," says the boss, "but it seems like everyone we've contacted, they take $200 or $300, and you never hear from them again."

Buca is qualified for a green card, but he's competing against millions of other candidates. Experts estimate the number of unauthorized Mexican immigrants in the United States at somewhere between 5 million and 6 million, with nearly half a million crossing our southern border annually during the last five years. Because the law caps annual immigration from any one nation at 7 percent of the total, these millions are competing for fewer than 26,000 permanent resident green cards a year for Mexicans. The only additions to this quota are for those with U.S.-citizen spouses, parents, or children able to sponsor them. The system provides only 140,000 spots for employment-based green card applicants, and only 40,000 of those are for aspiring immigrants with education at the baccalaureate level or below. Just 10,000 permanent resident visas a year cover the unskilled jobs that most Mexican immigrants fill.

Buca's current application emphasizes his training in handling pesticides and operating farm equipment. He might apply for a commercial driver's license to improve his chances of landing one of the skilled labor spots. But the odds are still extremely low. As of October, the Department of Homeland Security was still processing employment-based green card applications filed by Mexicans in 2000 and earlier. North Carolina alone has an estimated 300,000 undocumented immigrants. "It's gotten crazy for people like Buca who are every bit as American as people who were born here," says his neighbor Richard.

Amanda has almost no shot at a green card. It will be another 10 years before Darby, a U.S.-born citizen, turns 21 and can sponsor her parents' application. Although she and her sister have known no other home, the Department of Homeland Security could deport their mother at any time. Back in Veracruz, Amanda dreamed of being a teacher. She'd love to pursue her GED and go to college. She trusts local officials, but she's afraid of attracting outside attention by filing an application.

During the 2004 Christmas season, Buca and Amanda's church lost its pastor after the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services denied his green card application for the third time and the county Baptist association decided it could no longer support an illegal immigrant. The Sanchez family, Amanda's longtime friends, chose to send their children back to Mexico for college because, even though they grew up in local schools, their undocumented status precludes in-state tuition benefits. Fortunately for the Christmas tree workers and a local economy that relies on their labor, immigration agents don't venture to these parts unless they can round up undocumented felons or groups of 25 or more illegal aliens, according to Sheriff Hartley. That rarely happens.

It's one of the main reasons Hispanics say they've settled here and probably one reason why the Hispanic population in the rural South is growing at a much higher rate than in more obvious places such as California.

The High Country Hispanic community is waiting for Congress to consider the Agricultural Job Opportunity, Benefits, and Security Act, nicknamed AgJobs, which for three years in a row has died before any real debate. Endorsed by the National Christmas Tree Association, the National Council of La Raza, and various labor unions, including the AFL-CIO, the AgJobs bill aims to make the H-2A program more attractive to growers and give current farm workers and their families a chance at permanent residence. As long as he works at least 360 days in agriculture over six years following the bill's passage, Buca would be guaranteed a green card. In April 2005 a Senate majority supported AgJobs, but the bill barely missed the 60 votes needed to overcome a Republican filibuster.

A broader piece of immigration reform legislation, the Secure America and Orderly Immigration Bill of 2005, co-sponsored by Sens. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.), would expand green card quotas to eliminate the backlogs that stymie longtime undocumented workers. Although this bill also has widespread support, it remains to be seen whether Republicans can iron out sharp disagreements within their party. Some favor stricter enforcement of existing laws and oppose creating new paths to naturalization.

Meanwhile, the families of U.S. farm workers suffer the pain of separation. I visited Amanda and her girls a few days after returning from a trip to Florida to see my own parents, siblings, and in-laws during Christmas of 2004. Buca's return was still a month away. As I sat in her kitchen, at the end of a two-day visit to the mountains, three hours from my own wife and daughters, 4-year-old Daisy tugged on my arm and asked if I missed them.

"Yes," I said. "Very much."

"I miss my daddy," she said.

The Looming Immigration War

info@reason.com (Jeff Taylor) — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 00:00:00 EST

Meet Jorge Humberto Hernandez Soto. The Mexican national is helping to flog Congress toward a showdown over the nation's immigration laws. Soto—unlicensed, illegal, and drunk—managed to get a borrowed Ford Explorer going 100 miles per hour the wrong way down Interstate 485 outside Charlotte, N.C., hitting another car and killing an 18-year old college student in the process.

Incidents like the one involving Soto, who was sent back to Mexico at least 17 times by U.S. authorities before his deadly wreck two weeks ago, are fueling popular demand for action—any action—at the federal, state, and local level. Across the nation, reliable weather-vane politicians like North Carolina Rep. Sue Myrick are rushing to demonstrate their tough-on-immigration credentials, lining up behind tougher immigration and border control legislation.

As a result, what was once Rep. Tom Tancredo's (R-Colo.) own personal hot-button issue is now a national immigration-reform movement. Fanned by talk-radio, not to mention Republican mania for some kind of wedge issue now that they've abandoned fiscal conservatism, immigration is shaping up as the Us vs. Them issue, certainly for next year's midterm election and perhaps 2008 as well.

Tancredo is sniffing around Iowa and has the dreaded and dread-filled potential POTUS candidate's book—In Mortal Danger—on the way. His Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus now has 91 members and expects to get actual House floor votes on several of its reform bills when Congress returns. With the GOP leadership in disarray, there is no telling how many votes the proposal might get.

As ever, a clumsy Bush administration move sparked the political firestorm. The White House spit out a half-hearted immigration reform plan, the core of which was a conceptually sound but poorly explained guest worker program. Many conservatives of a populist stripe never heard anything past the words "guest worker." A guest worker has to work somewhere, you see, and work means a job. A job that an American citizen would otherwise have. This is an absolute article of faith among the immigration reform camp.

They believe, for example, that contrary to several decades of experience, there exists a wage rate at which American citizens will claw sweet potatoes out of the sandy South Carolina soil with their bare hands, Jorge Humberto Hernandez Soto–style.

The reformers also promise harsh penalties on employers who hire illegal labor, a reflection of the certitude that the Bush administration is slow to act on the issue because "big business" wants cheap labor. You know, those corporate sweet potato buyers who could pay $10 a pound for tubers, but just like sticking it to the working man in between sipping double-scotches and buying yachts.

However, nothing reflects the profound shift in congressional thinking about immigration than the sudden conviction that "anchor babies" are part of America's immigration problem. Children born of illegal parents in the U.S. become citizens automatically, thus serving to anchor their parents to the country, sucking up entitlements and public school seats in the bargain. Along with a sturdy border fence, an end to anchor babies has become one of the magic-bullet fixes many reformers insist upon.

"I'm all in favor of people from other countries becoming U.S. citizens, but I don't know that it is appropriate to become a citizen automatically just by having the parents come into this country illegally and then be born here," Rep. John Shadegg (R-Ariz.) told The Arizona Republic last week.

Shadegg is one of 69 co-sponsors of a bill that would end America's policy of birth-rights citizenship. At one time advocating this change—which would seemingly require an amendment to the Constitution—was mostly for show. But reformers have recently embraced the interpretation of the 14th amendment offered by Chapman University School of Law professor John Eastman.

Eastman turned heads in September in testimony before the House Immigration, Border Security and Claims subcommittee by arguing that the amendment could be read to mean that children born to illegals in the U.S. were not citizens precisely because, as illegals, the parents had not subjected themselves to the jurisdiction of the U.S. government.

It is a controversial reading of the amendment, and the change would still face many hurdles—not the least of which would be the Senate —even if it were somehow to pass the House. But that such a fundamental change in American law is even under serious discussion underscores the degree to which immigration reform is a salient national political issue, as opposed to a state-wide or regional concern. There is no denying that House Republicans, Tancredo especially, intend to run with an immigration crackdown for 2006 and see where it leads.

Jeff A. Taylor writes the weekly Reason Express.

Prostituting the Constitution

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Tue, 16 Aug 2005 00:00:00 EDT

Back in the 1980s, when Attorney General Edwin Meese was leading a spirited, if futile, crackdown on obscenity, Adam & Eve impresario Phil Harvey spent eight years and $3 million fighting for his right to peddle XXX wares to the American public. Three administrations later, Harvey is again embroiled in a free speech battle with the feds—but this time, instead of fighting for the right to say and sell what he pleases, he's suing for the right to stay silent. (Full disclosure: Harvey is a donor to Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason Online.)

Harvey won't sign the "anti-prostitution pledge," a 15-word proclamation dreamed up in the halls of Congress. That's a problem, because Harvey is president of DKT International, a charitable organization that markets subsidized condoms in developing countries. In addition to proceeds from Adam & Eve, the adult entertainment firm he started to fund his charitable activities, Harvey and DKT rely on grants from the United States Agency of International Development (USAID). When DKT put in a request for $60,000 to fund condom-related work in Vietnam in June, the organization was essentially told: If you want the cash, sign the pledge.

The much-hated anti-prostitution pledge was born in 2003, when President Bush signed the Global AIDS Act and appropriated $15 billion to fight the disease. The act contained a provision that denies any piece of that windfall to organizations that "promote the legalization or practice" of sex work or do not "have a policy explicitly opposing" the trade. The Department of Justice ruled in early 2004 that the restriction did not apply to U.S.-based organizations, who enjoy the benefit of constitutionally protected free speech. Then DOJ changed its mind. As of today, if you want to fight HIV/AIDS with taxpayer cash, you've got to promise that none of your policies "promote the practice" of the world's oldest profession.

USAID has long wrapped its gifts in stipulations. The Mexico City Policy, introduced by Reagan in 1984, denies aid to organizations that perform abortions in cases other than a threat to the woman's life, rape, or incest; provide counseling and referral for abortion; or lobby to make abortion legal. DKT challenged that policy in 1988, and the courts decided the rule lawfully applied to foreign organizations but not domestic ones. The policy therefore requires foreign organizations to conform to a standard U.S.-based organizations can ignore. Bill Clinton rescinded the rule on the first day of his presidency. George W. Bush reinstated it on the first day of his.

It may not seem entirely unreasonable that a legislature contributing $15 billion to fight AIDS make some demands about the way it is used. Indeed, if Congress had simply asked that its billions not be used to give condoms to sex workers, DKT would not have a case. But rather than specify how the money be used, the Act determines who is eligible for government funds. And it makes that determination based on what's called "viewpoint-based speech." That, says DKT, is verboten, for the same reason that the state can't compel children to recite the Pledge of Allegiance as a condition of receiving public schooling. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the government can't make participation in government programs conditional on holding a specific viewpoint.

Consider how deeply the pledge affects the private activities of DKT. If it wants that $60,000 for Vietnam, the organization must agree to apply the prostitution pledge to unrelated speech and activities all over the world—including those bankrolled by the Gates Foundation, Hewlett-Packard, the Indian, Dutch, German and Irish governments, and, of course, the customers of Adam and Eve. DKT only accepts 13 percent of its funds from USAID, yet if the organization is to dip into that $15 billion, it must conform 100 percent of its activities to congressional demands.

Do any organizations actually promote prostitution, or is this just a fun exercise in First Amendment pettifoggery? It's hard to sy what it means to "promote the practice" of selling sex, but aid workers say reaching and educating prostitutes is key to fighting sexually transmitted disease. Stigmatizing the trade, they say, only makes hard-to-find sex workers harder to reach. The Brazilian government has been brash enough to turn down $40 million in USAID money rather than sign. In May, 200 organizations sent a letter to President Bush declaring that the policy would undermine their work. One hundred or so other organizations then responded with a scare-quote-ridden letter of their own, asking the president to hold firm. Though the second batch of letter writers have clearly lost the prostitution pledge popularity contest, they're riding a wave of conservative successes on foreign aid issues. Rep. Mark Souder (R-Ind.) is trying to push an anti–harm reduction pledge, which would do to needle exchange what the current pledge is doing to sex-worker outreach.

Harvey, who has won a string of suits on First Amendment grounds, says he expects the pledge controversy will be hashed out much like the Mexico City Policy storm was years ago—with a policy that applies only to foreign organizations. If he prevails, domestic groups can spend less time thinking about vice and more time thinking about international development. Of course, for Phil Harvey, the two have long been intimately related.

Converts for CAFTA?

info@reason.com (Jeff Taylor) — Mon, 18 Jul 2005 00:00:00 EDT

Charlotte—Give the White House credit for finding one of the few places on Earth where people are more concerned about trade policy than about Karl Rove's phone records for George Bush to pitch the Central American Free Trade Agreement. Unfortunately, a North Carolina mill town is precisely the kind of place that remains highly suspicious of trade liberalization and deeply anxious about America's ability to compete freely in global marketplace.

Stowe Mills in Belmont, across by the muddy Catawba River from the bustling banking center of Charlotte, was not even the administration's first choice for the event. Initial plans called for Bush to visit the Greensboro area, partly in hopes of turning Rep. Howard Coble (R-N.C.) around on CAFTA. But when Coble made it clear he was not about to support the agreement, in part because he sees the face of his dear, departed mother every time he walks into a textile mill, the fallback was a visit to Rep. Sue Myrick's district. Myrick (R-N.C.) is the lone member of the state's House contingent to support CAFTA. The dearth of support reflects the widespread belief that overseas competition is to blame for the loss of textile jobs in the state. Since 1994 the Charlotte area alone has seen 23,000 textile jobs melt away.

So with the deck stacked against him, how did Bush do? In terms of making a clear case for the benefits of trade, remarkably well. Were the passage of CAFTA simply a matter of debating points, Bush took home the trophy.

Bush honed in the fact that the 44 million-strong Central American market, once free of tariffs on U.S. goods, could prove very lucrative. He noted that U.S. exports currently face significant tariffs on items ranging from heavy equipment to textiles to farm products. Pork, for example, faces a 47 percent tariff. Or as Bush told the crowd: "You grow a lot of hogs here. And you're good at it; you're really good at it. And you grow more than we eat."

With North Carolina a top pork exporting state, that was an important rhetorical point for the president to make.

Bush also directly confronted the Chinese issue. What does China have to do with CAFTA? Everything, in the minds of many North Carolinians convinced that China is America's direct competitor for furniture, textiles, electronics, you name it. Anxiety about Chinese competition spills over to all trade debate as part of a psychological transference process underpinned by the certitude that wily China will somehow turn any American trade liberalization anywhere to China's wily, unfair advantage.

However, Bush blunted the China fear by pitching CAFTA as a way to tie Central American markets to the U.S. and keep the Chinese at bay. CAFTA would also help strengthen the middle classes of U.S. trading partners in the region, helping to stabilize them politically. These arguments, which frame trade more as a security issue rather than an economic issue, seem to have a great deal of traction with workers in the manufacturing sector who seek reassurance about their place in the world as much as a steady paycheck.

In fact, if Bush really wanted to connect with his audience, he should have expanded on the quick observation that more jobs in a prosperous Central America means fewer people looking to "sneak across the border." North Carolina, like many states in the Southeast, is fairly obsessed with illegal immigration from Mexico and points south.

But what is it that has made the economic benefits of free trade such a tough sell in so many places? In addition to the security angle, it could be that the occasional presidential fly-by extolling the virtues of free trade just does not match the nearly daily drumbeat of large sacks of cash hitting the ground from state and local interests bent on providing business incentives.

While the president argues that agreements like CAFTA let economic resources move freely and efficiently to everyone's benefit, state and local officials scurry around "managing" the flow of jobs and prosperity to communities. This is a huge policy disconnect. North Carolina, for example, recently handed Dell at least $280 million to build a computer plant a short drive up I-85 from Bush's CAFTA rally. If government can manage what amounts to domestic trade among the states so well, why not manage foreign trade as well, with similar incentives to businesses to keep jobs in the U.S.?

The answer is you could, if you wanted a high tax, low-productivity, low-innovation economy, i.e. a fundamentally un-American economy. This is the bedrock pro-freedom argument that Bush did not really make in Belmont and cannot be made often enough.

"Look," the president could say, "I don't know if there will be textile jobs in North Carolina or Georgia or anywhere in America in 10 years with or without CAFTA. But I do know that CAFTA and barrier-free trade promote change and competition in the world. And America changes really, really well."

That line of argument may or may not move the House to back CAFTA, but it has the virtue of being true.

The Other Insurrections

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 11 May 2005 00:00:00 EDT

In the wake of two strikingly successful, mostly nonviolent, and essentially democratic insurrections, a major magazine bemoaned the upheaval under the headline "The Downside of People Power." "The military coup may be a thing of the past," its editorialist declared, "but the popular coup is in vogue." If the language sounds familiar, it might be because it unconsciously echoes The Guardian's famous description of the Ukrainian revolution as a "postmodern coup d'etat." But this article did not appear in The Guardian, and the revolts it rebuked did not take place in Ukraine or Kyrgyzstan or Lebanon. The piece was in the May 9 Business Week, and the rebellions were in Ecuador and Mexico.

Latin America's outbreak of people power hasn't received as much stateside attention as its counterparts in Central Asia and the Middle East. This is presumably for the same reason media accounts of nonviolent Arab movements often ignore Palestinian resistance to Israel's "security barrier": The uprisings aren't aligned with U.S. interests. Official Washington has not been celebrating South America's turn to the left—three-quarters of the continent's people now live under left-wing governments—and popular protest is generally regarded as a part of that shift. So it gets left out of the narrative of democratic transformation, and when it does surface, it's treated rather differently than its Asian equivalents. Instead of Business Week's Jason Bush describing the Ukrainian and Georgian protestors as "democratic political movements," we have Business Week's Geri Smith complaining that "citizens are taking to the streets, rather than the ballot box, to register their political grievances." (Actually, they've been taking to both.) She also quotes Moisés Naim of Foreign Policy, who calls the ferment "the politics of race, revenge, and resentment." The solution, Smith concludes, is for the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank to subsidize "solid government institutions."

Smith and Naim aren't alone. When The Christian Science Monitor's Danna Harman filed a solid report on the Latin American upheaval, published April 29, the voice of caution was Vinay Jawahar of the establishment group Inter-American Dialogue, who told Harman that it was "hard to argue that this sort of instability is good for a country." You'd think it harder to argue that it's good for a president to dissolve his country's Supreme Court, which is what happened in Ecuador before the subsequent protests reversed his illegal decision and forced him out of office. Or for a ruling party to trump up charges against its most popular opponent to keep him off the ballot, which is what happened in Mexico before popular discontent rode to the rescue. Some sorts of instability are good for a country, especially when the status quo is hardly stable itself. The growing popularity of these tactics has a positive spillover effect as well. Long before the demonstrations in Ukraine and Lebanon, unnoticed by most observers, people power was undermining not just violent regimes but violent revolts.

For much of the twentieth century, the chief means of overthrowing a government were guerilla warfare and military coups. Nonviolent resistance existed—at times it thrived—but it was generally regarded as an odd aberration that rarely worked. But since the '70s, for a variety of reasons, the trend in revolution-making has been a gradual global shift from violent "people's war" to nonviolent people power. In an important new book, Unarmed Insurrections, the Rutgers sociologist Kurt Schock points out that there were 31 major nonviolent rebellions in the second and third worlds from 1978 to 2001, starting with the Iranian revolution of 1978-79. (It's important to distinguish the overthrow of the Shah, a classic example of people power, from Khomeini's later consolidation of state power, a much more coercive affair.)

Nonviolent resistance, Schock reminds us, is not the same thing as "passive resistance." It's a set of tactics, not a politically correct lifestyle; it's aimed not at persuading leaders to change their policies, but at making it impossible to enforce those policies. Gene Sharp has been cataloging those tactics for decades, listing 198 of them in 1973's three-volume study The Politics of Nonviolent Action and citing several more since then. They fall into three general categories: methods of protest and public persuasion (e.g., a march), of organized noncooperation (e.g., a tax strike), and of "nonviolent intervention" (e.g., a land occupation). Contrary to the conventional wisdom, such methods have frequently worked under repressive dictatorships as well as under relatively benign systems; many times they've succeeded where guerilla tactics have failed. In 23 of those 31 rebellions, from Bolivia to Bulgaria and from Mongolia to Mali, the uprising contributed directly to regime change.

And that statistic understates what has happened, since it focuses on the most visible sort of success. More substantial changes can occur without the government formally changing hands. Of the recent turbulence in Latin America, the most interesting event may be the revolt of the Bolivian Indians. They were the backbone of the protests that drove President Sanchez de Lozada out of power in 2003, and of the more recent turmoil as well, but that's not what I'm referring to here. I'm referring to the fact that about a fifth of the country's population now lives in villages that run their own affairs, outside of the capital's control. This power was not ceded to them. They simply took it.

That's a rural phenomenon, but it has urban echoes: The state has had a hard time governing El Alto, the overwhelmingly Indian city at the heart of the 2003 rebellion. Similar semi-autonomous zones exist in other South American countries. The Nasa Indians of Colombia, for example, gradually took back their traditional lands from the 1960s to the 1990s, and do what they can today to fend off incursions by government officials, right-wing paramilitaries, and Marxist guerillas.

Then there's a social movement that's rarely regarded as a movement at all: the squatters who occupy unused, usually government-owned land in and around most major third world cities. There they've built vast, self-governing neighborhoods that, despite some serious social problems, are usually more pleasant places to live than the legally sanctioned slums. Some, indeed, have evolved into middle-class neighborhoods. (In Shadow Cities, his account of life among the squatters of Brazil, Kenya, India, and Turkey, Robert Neuwirth notes that mainstream Brazilian businesses have started to set up shop within the illicit favelas, in "the squatter city version of gentrification.") In such territories, simply building a house is, technically, an act of civil disobedience, but millions of people have constructed not just homes and enterprises but decentralized systems of self-government—a civil society that can then resist, often successfully, when the state attempts to crack down.

This shouldn't be alien to North American audiences. U.S. history is filled with similar rebellions—and not just the famous revolt against Jim Crow. Our own rural squatters settled the West in enormous numbers, their claims eventually ratified by state occupancy laws and federal preemption acts. The nation's law libraries are littered with rules that were rendered a dead letter by disobedience before they were formally repealed or reversed, from sodomy bans to the regulations governing CB radios.

If Latin Americans, in the words of Business Week, "are taking to the streets, rather than the ballot box, to register their political grievances," that's no reason to mourn. The power to disobey unjust laws and unjust rulers is an essential part of political liberty. So is the ability to create grassroots institutions with the resilience to withstand repression. Real self-government is not a mere spectator sport, a matter of politely casting a ballot every few years—especially, as in Ecuador and Mexico, when the last gang to get elected is actively undermining the rules of the game.

Look Back in Failure

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Wed, 19 Jan 2005 00:00:00 EST

Colin Powell leaves his highest-ranking, and possibly last, government post this month. He came in as the unimpeachable Serious Adult of Bush's team, trailing mostly respect and adulation. As the star of the early W. days, Powell was considered a fair threat to outshine his boss. David Plotz at Slate summed up well those qualities that allowed the idea of Powell to capture political punditry and the American people so strongly—prior to his now-ending stint as Bush's secretary of state:

Powell is confirmation of the American dream: A black man from modest circumstances can do anything if he works hard enough. He affirmed idealism about the U.S. military: It is the meritocratic, colorblind institution it claims to be. And he is a role model and champion of hard work, discipline, honesty, loyalty, patriotism, and good humor.

Powell walks away now as a man who, at best, survived, and kept a great reputation for commanding a room with suitable military bearing and gravitas. And that's about all he has going for him—that and rumors, always denied (apparently at his wife Alma's overpowering insistence) that he'll be the GOP's Great Black Hope in some (always future) election. Most recently, U.S. News and World Report has been talking him up as Jeb's running mate in the Bush III administration to launch right on schedule in 2008.

Such fantasies seem based on remembrances of Powell past, not the Powell of the past four years, the feckless alleged "opposition voice" in Bushite foreign policy who ended up shamed as he stood up to take the public heat for explaining why we did indeed have to go to war with Iraq. Powell spoke authoritatively of sinister taped conversations, of hard-to-interpret but menacing aerial shots, of Iraq-Al Qaeda links (in Kurdish parts of Iraq) and chemical weapon stockpiles and aluminum tubes, many excuses why a war against Iraq was necessary and proper. Alas, none of his earnestly presented reasons have turned out to be true or accurate.

His final and most enduring legacy is that ongoing disaster of a war he stood up for before the eyes of the world—one which even he has recently told the President, according to former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia Chas Freeman, "We're losing."

Despite Powell's reputation for having silently fumed in opposition, this war was sold most decisively by his own pathetic performance before a U.N. that, even with his series of misleading ominous "facts," he could not sway to cooperate with U.S. policy. He was trading on his own reputation as the reluctant warrior. (My favorite statement of what came to be known as the "Powell Doctrine" of fighting only when everyone is in line and our power is overwhelming came from Powell in 1995 to Henry Louis Gates Jr.: "I believe in the bully's way of going to war. 'I'm on the street corner, I got my gun, I got my blade, I'ma kick yo' ass.'") He was no ideologue, the combination of his previous stances and the U.N. speech implied, but a man driven by cold facts to rip out the last plank that Iraq doves had to stand on. But, as James Mann wrote in his 2004 book Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet, "For American diplomacy, the six-month venture at the United Nations was a remarkable failure. The Bush administration had come into office promising to give new emphasis to ties with Mexico and, more generally, to Latin America, but had failed to win the backing of either Mexico or Chile... Russia stood with France and Germany in opposition to the United States. Powell and [Deputy Secretary of State Richard] Armitage had labored to develop strong relations with Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf, but Pakistan wouldn't come out in support of the American position either."

That whole sorry debacle is not the picture of a great diplomat, a great politician, or a strong and principled man. It is one of a careerist. A very good one, at that—he's certainly had quite a career, hitting all the high points a military man and diplomat of his generation could hit.

Still, where has it left the country he served? With our dollar weak, our debt ballooning, and our armed forces overextended, diplomacy and an ability to win the aid and even sometimes the affection of the rest of the world will be necessary for the U.S. to maintain itself as the hyperpower—a self-image the current administration has no apparent desire to abandon.

Even the most strident France-basher would have a hard time blaming America's strained international relations entirely on the cheese-eating perfidy of our western allies. Nor are they entirely the fault of the State Department—though promoting strong international relations while pursuing American interests is clearly in the job description of a Secretary of State, and Powell has failed to do this.

But it's Powell's particular genius to stroll intact through fields of failure. He leaves a literally diminished State Department, with the Immigration and Naturalization Service abolished and most visa-issuing duties transferred to the Department of Homeland Security; it's not something Powell will be bragging on in his r�sum�, but who would be so churlish as to fault him for this important reorganization of national bureaucracies? Similarly, it seems unimpressive that a Secretary of State should sit by and allow the Defense Department to do the heavy lifting in statecraft; but hey, that just shows that Powell is a team player (the Powell mode of team playing being more about pleasing the front office than acting in the best interests of the team).

Whatever abstract value Powell had as the administration's voice of caution, his only real service came in the form of publicly swallowing his doubts. Notice his final gift to the president and his supposed neocon enemies: his declaration that—shades of his U.N. speech—"I have seen some information that would suggest that [Iranians] have been actively working on delivery systems... You don't have a weapon until you put it in something that can deliver a weapon... There is no doubt in my mind...they have been interested in a nuclear weapon that has utility, meaning that it is something they would be able to deliver, not just something that sits there." Powell's real legacy is to have been the Bush administration's human sacrifice, a perfunctory gesture at careful and humble foreign policy on the march to a situation where the United States stage-manages tense relations between China and Taiwan and Israel and the nascent Palestinian state, handles threats from Iran and North Korea, and guarantees the peace, prosperity, and security of the whole freakin' planet.

Powell's vision for that last idea was presented in a valedictory piece he wrote in the Jan./Feb. issue of Foreign Policy. It's as mushy-brained and expansionist as any neocon pipe dream of bringing democracy to the world. Powell's is, in hubristic terms if not in blood, perhaps even more expansionist. The Bush administration whose diplomacy he headed, Powell wrote, "see[s] development, democracy, and security as inextricably linked," and it is part of our duty to help the world "work hard and wisely on economic development," indeed to "eradicate poverty" worldwide, with a plan to bring the entire world up to economic and political snuff through foreign aid and development programs, "phase by phase, one country at a time, for as long as it takes." It's a mission big enough that it could win the hearts of "national greatness" conservatives who feel a need to attach themselves to this Republican-of-convenience with dreams of his pre-Bush public approval ratings.

Powell hasn't left us in a good position to carry out such grandiose maneuverings, for some reasons that he bears responsibility for, and some he doesn't. But overall he leaves his nation with little reason to regret his passing from the public scene. His departure will be as dry-eyed, and rightly so, as U.S. News and World Report notes his own plans to go have been. "Be ready to leave for good on the last day. No dillydallying... No sentimental reminiscing with the staff. 'Get the car packed up in advance,' he said. 'After the parade, hand over the flag and get into the car and drive. And don't look back.'" If Colin Powell's public reputation is to have a promising future, the less looking back, the better for him.

Beyond the Barbed Wire

info@reason.com (Daniel Griswold) — Fri, 03 Dec 2004 00:00:00 EST

At the end of the recent APEC summit in Santiago, Chile, President Bush made it clear he plans to spend a chunk of the "political capital" he accumulated on Election Day to persuade Congress to enact real immigration reform. This was a shrewd calculation, for Bush made immigration reform a priority in both his campaign and his first administration. His re-election provides a mandate to push ahead with changes that will help the many people who want to work in the United States and, if history is any guide, alleviate the very real problem of illegal immigration.

Back in January, at some political risk, the president called on Congress to reform America's dysfunctional immigration system. Specifically, the president proposed a temporary worker visa for foreign-born workers who want to fill jobs that Americans typically shun, and for the legalization of millions of peaceful, hardworking but undocumented immigrants already here. The president re-affirmed his support during the presidential debates.

The proposal was not just a political ploy to win Hispanic votes. Since his days as governor of Texas, Bush has praised the economic and social contributions of immigrants from Mexico. Of course, politics played a part. Immigration reform is popular with Hispanics, a rapidly growing segment of the population that has become America's largest minority group. While Hispanics tend to vote for Democrats, savvy Republicans such as Karl Rove have long realized that Republicans need to attract Hispanic voters if they are to remain competitive in national elections.

Conservative opponents of immigration see danger rather than opportunity in the Hispanic vote. For years they've warned that millions of new Hispanic immigrants will inevitably turn into loyal Democratic voters, relegating the party of Reagan to permanent minority status. For much of 2004, they dismissed the president's immigration initiative as a flop with Hispanics that would only alienate the president's base of support.

Once again, the restrictionists have been proven wrong. There is no evidence that President Bush paid a political price for his support for a more compassionate and just immigration system. His conservative base came out in force to support him, while the evidence mounts that immigration reform helped Bush with Hispanics. As a post-election news story in the Wall Street Journal concluded, "His longstanding appeals to Hispanics, on issues such as immigration, helped him carry 42 percent of their votes nationally—compared with 35 percent in 2000—and a majority in Florida. That helped him achieve a comfortable victory in the critical battleground state."

The president's strong performance in other Hispanic-rich states such as Arizona, Nevada, Texas, and New Mexico indicate that he did at least as well with Hispanics as in 2000. Just about every other political analyst outside the restrictionist camp agrees.

In this case, what is good politics for Bush and the Republicans is also good policy. Our immigration laws desperately need reform. Today an estimated 9 million people are living in the United States illegally, with the number growing by an estimated net 350,000 a year.

Simply throwing more money and manpower at the problem hasn't worked. Since the early 1990s, we've quintupled spending and tripled personnel at the Mexican border. We've built three-tiered walls for 60 miles into the desert. We've imposed sanctions on employers for the first time in U.S. history. We've raided discount stores and chicken processing plants in a futile attempt to repeal the laws of supply and demand.

One unintended consequence has been a deadly diversion of migration from a few urban entry points to more sparsely populated regions such as the Arizona border. Since 1998, more than 2,000 people have died of dehydration and suffocation while trying to cross the border. That's too high a price to pay for seeking a better job.

The reason for the failure is simple. Our existing immigration system is out of step with the realities of American life. Our economy continues to produce opportunities for low-skilled workers in important sectors of our economy such as retail, services, construction, and tourism. Meanwhile, the pool of Americans willing and happy to fill those jobs continues to shrink as the average American worker grows older and becomes better educated. Yet our immigration system has no legal channel for workers from Mexico and other countries to come to the United States even temporarily to fill those jobs. The result is widespread illegal immigration.

Opponents of immigration demand more of the same failed policies: more walls and barbed wire, entire divisions of troops at the border, the massive deportation of undocumented workers at great economic and human cost. President Bush's approach, in contrast, would replace an unsafe, disorderly, and illegal flow of immigrants with one that is safe, orderly, and legal.

In the early 1950s, rising illegal immigration from Mexico confronted us with a similar policy choice. The response then was to dramatically increase temporary worker visas under the Bracero program; the result was an equally dramatic decline in illegal immigration.

Legalization would improve the lot of millions of workers. Newly legalized workers would possess more bargaining power in the marketplace because they could more easily change jobs to improve their pay and working conditions. They would be more likely to qualify for private health insurance and to invest in their language and job skills.

Legalization would not equal "amnesty." Under the president's plan, legalized workers would not get automatic citizenship or even permanent residency. They would receive only a temporary visa renewable for a limited time. They would have to pay a fine for having lived here illegally that would not be chump change for low-skilled workers. They would have to get in line with everybody else to apply for permanent status under existing law.

Legalization would also enhance our national security. It would begin to drain the swamp of human smuggling and document fraud that facilitates illegal immigration. It would bring millions of people out of the shadows so we would know who they are. It would free resources for the war on terrorism. That's why Tom Ridge, out-going secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, expressed support for the president's proposal during a recent visit to Mexico.

Real immigration reform would be good policy and good politics. When his second term begins in January, President Bush should work with congressional leaders of both parties to make it a reality.

Judge, Jury, and Cop

info@reason.com (Hanah Metchis) — Mon, 01 Nov 2004 00:00:00 EST

Since 1996 the U.S. Border Patrol's "expedited removal" procedure has allowed it to ship illegal immigrants home from airports and seaports without a hearing before an immigration judge. Now this power is being expanded to cover people crossing at the borders with Mexico and Canada.

Bill Strassberger, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, which runs the Border Patrol, says deportation procedures that could take up to 12 months in the past can be processed in just a few days under the new policy. Many illegal immigrants are confined for months in detention centers while awaiting their court dates. "It's an effective use of the resources to enforce the immigrations laws of the country," he argues. "At the same time, we are protecting the rights of those persons who are seeking protection in the United States."

But Eleanor Acer, director of the asylum program at Human Rights First, says the expedited process cannot adequately protect the rights of asylum seekers. "It's destined to fail," she says. "It has no meaningful safeguards. This change gives border patrol officers the power to act like judges." In 2000 her group published "Is This America?," a study of expedited deportation in U.S. airports that cited many abuses as well as mistaken deportations of asylum seekers, businesspeople, and American citizens.

Go Ahead, Leave the Door Open

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Tue, 14 Sep 2004 00:00:00 EDT

Three years after 9/11, Time magazine informs us in this week's cover story, illegal immigrants are still coming into our country. And 190,000 of them, it darkly hints, are from mysterious lands other than Mexico—perhaps even lands where terrorist enemies are known to dwell, such as "Egypt, Iran and Iraq."

While its story leads with that national security hook—indeed, it's hard to believe it could have gotten such prominent 9/11 anniversary season placement without it—Time quickly drops that idea, probably since no terrorist threat has been convincingly linked to people physically crossing the Mexican border illegally. The great bulk of the long piece laments that ranchers, towns, and hospitals near the Mexican border are overwhelmed with illegal traffic (true), and detailing the apparently dreadful fact that these people actually tend to get jobs here in the United States, despite laws barring such shenanigans. Time doesn't even hint that that first problem would disappear pretty promptly as soon as we recognized that the second problem shouldn't really be considered a problem. That is, if we merely allowed people to legally come here and work if some American wanted to employ them, they would doubtless start coming here via more sensible conveyance—say, buying a bus ticket—rather than rushing en masse on foot in the dead of night through towns like Bisbee, cutting people's cattle fences, defecating in their fields, and hauling their dehydrated, car-wrecked selves into American emergency rooms and welshing on the bill.

As with the Drug War, most of the truly heinous results of our immigration laws, and the flouting of them, are because of the attempt to ban something that by its inherent nature isn't a bad thing at all: migrating to find work. If would-be workers didn't have to enter the country under fear of legal punishment, the lives of the American border dwellers whose fates the Time story tells so compellingly would be a lot more free of immigrant-related troubles.

As I noted in a previous article about America's futile and generally pointless war against people who want to come here to work,

Those worried that these immigrants will stick around forever and bury America in brown-skinned babies should take note of the findings of immigration scholar Douglas Massey. Studying the decades preceding the 1986 Immigration Control and Reform Act—a period when immigrants were able to move more or less freely across the Mexican-American border—Massey found that approximately 80 percent of Mexican immigrants did not stay permanently in the U.S. It's much easier to decide not to settle permanently when you know you can return freely if you choose to. Thus immigration laws create perverse incentives for Mexicans to stay in the United States permanently, a result that in turn frightens immigration opponents—who then demand more immigration laws. Government, if it is nothing else, is an efficient make-work program for more government.

Similarly, the problems of the people of Bisbee, Arizona, that Time demands more federal government action to solve begin with federal policy against people who want to come here from Mexico to work.

One needn't be a resolute fan of federal solutions, though, to be leery of less restricted immigration. Even some libertarians have launched arguments, some principled and some practical, against immigration. The most prominent principled one, courtesy of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, is based, roughly, on the notion that the government should in this regard be able to act as closely as possible to a private property owner, and thus have free rein to choose whom to let enter and for what purpose.

Of course, in an immigration law context, as the Time story makes clear, the government would in doing so prevent others from making employment deals of their choice with people of their choice. That's something private property owners generally don't have the right to do with regard to third parties.

The more practical argument is that a welfare state, and state-funded medical care and education, makes unrestricted immigration—alas! (or maybe not alas) —untenable. Just being realistic. Why the reaction to this—accurate enough, in the long term—incompatibility should be an attempt to prohibit what would otherwise be a perfectly unobjectionable action (moving and working), rather than an attempt to eliminate the illegitimate system of wealth redistribution, is left as an exercise for the reader. Just maybe, this argument is a legitimizing fallback mechanism for an argument ultimately based more on Samuel Huntington-style concern for "cultural integrity" and "national identity," the protection of which is not among the granted powers in the Constitution, as near as I can tell.

While purely illegal immigrants continue to cause consternation in the House of Luce, according to a recent Knight-Ridder article, increased post-9/11 border security for the trying-to-be-law-abiding foreign visitor is simultaneously causing all sorts of expensive problems for American businesses and universities—which are losing bright students to overseas institutions because of visa-related problems. "Applications by foreign students to attend American graduate schools this fall plunged 32 percent," Knight-Ridder's Tim Johnson reports:

Complaints about denials of visas for foreign business travelers are rife. In the survey conducted last spring among 734 member companies for the National Foreign Trade Council and seven other business groups, 7 out of 10 companies said some of their foreign employees couldn't come to the United States for meetings. Half said they couldn't bring some customers to the United States for product inspections or training.

Enforcing existing immigration law is already impossible, as Homeland Security Undersecretary Asa Hutchinson recently acknowledged. He told The Washington Times that

it is "not realistic" to think that law-enforcement authorities can arrest or deport the millions of illegal aliens now in the United States. [Hutchinson] does not think the American public has the "will...to uproot" those aliens... Hutchinson also said taxpayers "might be afraid" to learn how much it would take in manpower and resources to control the nation's borders and described as "probably accurate" a statement that no law-enforcement officials are looking for the vast majority of the 8 million to 12 million illegal aliens thought to be in the country.

President Bush's announced plan to assimilate many existing illegal immigrants through work permits never turned into legislation; we've had another year of mostly business-as-usual immigration policy. But what this Time article posits as the crisis in American immigration doesn't have to be a crisis at all. All the government has to do is recognize that if someone wants to work here to better themselves, and someone else wants to hire them to do so, that's not a federal issue. That's America.