Originally Posted by roachboy

dk--i am not sure i understand why you see a disconnect between defense of "real americans" and xenophobia---they seem linked---the distinction legal/illegal seems to me of little value as a function of the basic fact that if there was no labor market that routinely hired folk without proper documentation, then there would be no flows. the idea of stopping such flows as exist by arbitrarily patrolling a largely ireelvant border seems to me ludicrous. if you, or anyone else, really thinks that undocumented immigrants are a real problem, you migth consider bringing pressure to bear on industries that hire them, which are, have been and will remain the central motor of the problem, such as it is.

Originally Posted by roachboy

another way: if there is a percieved problems for working class and /or petit bourgeois folk with undocumented workers, then it seems more reasonable to advocate some kind of large-scale readjustment of the way in which the present american capitalist system is organized in order to better equip this place to djust to the changes in demand for labor that are at the source of the real problem--not the fake one of illegal immigrants--the real one that is displaced onto illegal immigrant workers. that your paranoid view of the state would prevent ay such move is not a function of the accuracy of your understanding of the situation---it simply shows the limitations your politics, insofar as i understand them from what i read of them here, impose on your definitions of problems and ways of thinking about how to solve them. behind this perhaps is a naieve assumption that capitalist infrastructure simply happens as a function of the operation of markets--this is empirically false. the main function of the state, when you think about it historically, has been the stabilization of the capitalist system, the assurance of its reproduction--the assuring of reproduction is primarily a function of infrastructure building--which extends to all kinds of things like basic power service to the ways in which educational systems are oriented toward reproduction of the labor pool. maybe you should be thinking more about a possible new deal-like operation that would address the real problems being generated by the defunctionalization of the american systems of social reproduction as a result of how globalizing capitalism is unfolding.

the fact that the entire view of undocumented workers as problem is oriented the wrong way round seems to me a demonstration of at the least the types of displacement that are involved with the bizarre decision to see in illegal immigratn workers the motor of the economic ills that groups like militias organize, at one level or another, as responses to. i say at the least because i am not at all sure but that i am gving these groups too much credit by adding extra steps--the alternate, simpler explanation is that the minutemen militia is organized around xenophobia as its primary structuring principle.