We keep you alive to serve this ship. So row well, and live.

This story hits the Republican anti-immigrant base/ support the troops/ Bush is a moral man trifecta.

CBS/AP) While the U.S. military searches for a soldier missing in Iraq, kidnapped by insurgents possibly allied with al Qaeda, his wife back home in Massachusetts may be deported by the U.S. government.

Army Spec. Alex Jimenez, who has been missing since his unit was attacked by insurgents in Iraq on May 12, had petitioned for a green card for his wife, Yaderlin Hiraldo, whom he married in 2004.

Their attorney, Matthew Kolken, said 23-year-old Hiraldo illegally entered the United States in 2001 to reunite with her husband, whom she had met in her native Dominican Republic and later married at his New York State Army base in 2004.

If you haven't been following the search for the two soldiers then suffice it say it looks like Jimenez is most likely dead. Judging by state of the body of his squad mate that they recovered it's a good guess to say his death was probably pretty horrible.

You could argue that he knew the risks when he signed up and that he probably signed up just to gain residency for himself and his wife. I don't care. The least you could say is that he took that risk. Most of the critics of immigration seem to fall squarely into the chickenhawk category when it comes to the war in Iraq from where I'm sitting. He's obviously a braver man than they, regardless of his reasons.

All that doesn't even begin to touch on the thing that really disgusts me about this story. The Bush administration could give her amnesty with a wave of a pen. It doesn't appear to this point that they've avoided doing so out of any weird idea about sticking to the letter of the law (but only on immigration, mind you) but rather that they simply don't care.

It's just another vivid reminder that the soldiers and their families are worthless in the eyes of this administration unless it's in their capacity as props to stand behind the President while he delivers a speech on how he's tough on terror.

Why, Rhett, how many times have I told you to wash up after weekly cross-burnin'?

This post by David Neiwert spells out how we have the immigration and border security debate completely assed-backwards. On the very same week that an extremist islamic cell is broken up in Canada we use our National Guard to patrol the Mexican border.


In other words, there are many more multiple opportunities for Islamist terrorists to enter the United States from Canada than there are from Mexico. Crossing the Canadian border in untracked areas, unlike the Mexican border, is neither terribly hazardous nor even particularly daunting.

However, most terrorism experts will tell you that terrorists prefer to travel incognito with fake papers and are most likely to try crossing through a regular port of entry with those papers. Remote border crossings are a real risk for such operatives because they become more exposed out in the open, rather than simply mingling in with the thousands who cross borders legally every day.


I know groups like the Minutemen see themselves as patriotic modern day Paul Reveres ("The brownies are comin', the brownies are comin'!") but they look to my eyes like nothing more than Klan members on a casual Friday.

But what about our leadership in Washington? When the country is run by cowardly hillbillys, incompetent cowardly hillbillys at that, I don't think we can expect any better, unfortunately.


(what is the plural of "hillbilly" anyway?)

As they say in my country, the only thing that separates us from the animals are mindless superstition and pointless ritual.

What a strange day.

First I got a call from an acquaintance in Turkey I hadn't talked to in a couple of years. He's just written a book and will be in the states later this year. If I wasn't on the NSA watch list for domestic spying I am now.

Then I ran into a good-sized immigration protest downtown over lunch:

This is just the first part of the march which covered about eight blocks altogether. Despite the rain it was a crowd that seemed very upbeat with lots of cheering. I marched along for a while but had to get back to work and as I got a couple of blocks away I heard the crowd chanting something new and stopped dead in my tracks.

They were chanting "USA, USA, USA!"

I can't even begin to describe how touching this was. As much as I bury myself in politics I sometimes forget that America isn't just a geographically fortunate lump of land but it's also an idea. Despite all the crappy stuff that we've done it's still an idea that people are willing to risk their lives for, fight for and take to the streets for.

Would that those of us who were blessed to have born into that idea had the guts to get off our fat asses and do the same.

Come and live with me in peace and safety, away from all the Wangdoodles and Hornswogglers and Snozzwangers and rotten Vermicious Knids.

Immigration is very much in the news as the legislature debates reform packages and politicos run wild.

What I find absolutely fascinating about the immigration debate is that it's one of those issues where everybody seems to have taken extreme positions on points which are really peripheral to the central question.

As an example I give you Thomas Sowell of the conservative RealClearPolitics who takes the "Undocumented workers do the jobs Americans will not do" argument to task--

Americans will not take many jobs at their current pay levels -- and those pay levels will not rise so long as poverty-stricken immigrants are willing to take those jobs.

If Mexican journalists were flooding into the United States and taking jobs as reporters and editors at half the pay being earned by American reporters and editors, maybe people in the media would understand why the argument about "taking jobs that Americans don't want" is such nonsense.

So the only thing keeping Americans from mowing the lawn at Jack Nicholson's Hollywood mansion is the immigrant worker willing to do it for so much cheaper. Remove the pressure of the immigrant willing to work on the cheap and Voila! An American gets a high-paying job in landscaping. Makes sense.

Speaking for myself I'd rather have a well paying job in an office or a laboratory. You know the kind you have to move to India to get.

23 March 2006 -- According to Information Week, Dell Computer and consulting firm Capgemini have become the latest tech powerhouses to publicly acknowledge plans to significantly increase headcount in India in order to tap the country's highly skilled, but relatively lowly paid, IT and business services workforce.

Dell could double its current Indian workforce of 10,000 over the next three years, a company spokesman confirmed on Monday. The Times of India and other Indian newspapers reported that company chairman Michael Dell announced the plan during a weekend roundtable with business reporters in Bangalore. Dell Computer will add the new positions "if the Indian market grows the way we believe it will," the spokesman said.

The middle class is getting squeezed. On the bottom end of the middle class they're competing for jobs with migrant workers and and a decreasing number of manufacturing jobs. On the upper end of the middle class the college educated are having to compete for a dwindling number of IT jobs stateside because of outsourcing.

This is the real issue that we're skirting for all the talk of immigration reform. For the last thirty years this country has pursued economic, tax and trade policies that are detrimental to the middle class. We've pursued these policies with the twin goals or competition and productivity with idea that's good for American business is what's good for America. We need to begin to disabuse ourselves of this notion and return to the policies of the late 40's and 50's, adopting the philosophy that what's good for the middle class is what's good for America.

It is only after our government initializes reforms that grow, rather than shrink, the middle class that we'll be able to deflate the symptoms of the problem such as immigration and outsourcing. Until that point forgive me if I don't begrudge our short, orange immigrant buddies from Loompaland.