smooth

They do pay taxes. That should be sufficient, after all, they'll never see the social security money they've paid.

Now, we could look at parts of Europe to see what happens when an advanced industrial nation (with its correlate: low birth rates and extended longevity) doesn't get enough imported labor. I find it unfortunate that many citizens will fall prey to political rhetoric and cut off their noses to spite their faces.


I am not resolved to any one position:

1) on the one hand, if we are going to embrace capitalism let's not have faux-capitalism. Free movement of capital requires free movement of labor for the system to work (if such a system is indeed capable of working). I find it unfortunate that Smith's name is bandied about so readily and I can't imagine how much of his work people have actually read.

capitalists know this. Bush knows this. but a corporate agenda to push wages down and create a labor surplus is opposed to the rhetoric employed to mobalize disenfranchised citizens within the nation: on grounds that jobs will be taken up by immigrants, on racial grounds (perceived and real threats to white identity), issues of security, legalities, and etc.
Thus they run into the very real problem of how to alter to discourse to allow for immigrant labor to become legitimized while not losing credibility before the people following their past rhetoric against the people supposedly at fault for lost jobs and etc. we will see more of this attempt to shift the way things are talked about in the public and political arena in the coming years of Bush's tenure.


2) but then we run into the issue of what to do with all these people. they need money, their families depend on their remissions, they do much work others won't, they are law abiding (despite whatever reasons someone might conjure up to the contrary based on the fact that they crossed an artificial barrier to their livlihood), and on and on.

the issues have become so tangled and contradictory for both platforms, it becomes hard for myself to tease out where I'd like to stand myself, much less listen to a politician speak about the matter as if the contradictions didn't exist.



Here and other places I see people who would otherwise extoll the virtues of the free market, yet they oppose the free movement of labor. That to me is a very strange position to place oneself into. It appears at first blush that such a person would want to have his or her cake and eat it to.

__________________
"The theory of a free press is that truth will emerge from free discussion, not that it will be presented perfectly and instantly in any one account." -- Walter Lippmann

"You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists." -- Abbie Hoffman