Reply #55: Well, I'm sorry to be shrill.

[EFerrari]

The thing is, abut 85-90% of what we think we know about undocumented immigrants turns out to be wrong. If you, on your own, fact check what is endlessly either repeated or assumed in the media, you can see this for yourself.

They do pay taxes, their crime rate is actually lower than most groups, they add to the economy, they do learn English, and they did come here in response to American policy which drove them north and they've been going in the other direction for some time now.

People get exercised about wages being driven down. The truth is, our wages have been flat and lagging since I started working in the mid-seventies. The big waves of immigrants started after that, not before. They started exactly under Raygun and Bush 1 kept them going, Clinton exploded them with NAFTA which decimated ag in southern Mexico and doubled the population along the northern border.

Another interesting effect is that laws such as the one that just pass in AZ don't result in higher wages for Americans or even legal citizens. They result in shuttered businesses. That's what has happened everywhere these laws have been passed.

The stability and economic well being of these immigrants is intimately bound up with our own. If they all left tomorrow, tens of thousands of communities all over this country would go belly up. And every corporation that could would outsource their operation and off shore their profits.

Riling up nationalism against these people is a distraction with little basis in reality. And the anti-immigrant movement is driven, at bottom, by white nationalists and the right wing who uses the issue to rally their base.