Stagnant wages, over crowded schools, the climbing prices of health insurance, basic necessities & energy costs can all be attributed to population increase. More demand and fewer supplies always leads to price hikes. Surplus labor alway leads to depressed wages or unemployment. Global warming was a hot topic this past year, no pun intended. What causes global warming? The bottom line: world wide population increases.

Currently the southern US is in a drought. The Southwest has been in one for more then a decade. Here in Ca even if we have a record snowfall in the Sierra Nevada this year there isn’t enough water. The drought will continue.

Now I don’t know what part of the US you live in, but I suspect it’s in the northwestern US. After all this is the Montana Women for site. If it is great, if not please bear with me. I have friends and family who live in that neck of the woods, so I expect you live there for the same reasons they do. It is because you enjoy the clean air, clean water, open spaces and a less dense population.

Lets say we allow everyone who came here illegally to stay. Then we allow them to bring in their family. You know grand parents, uncles & aunts, brothers, sisters. Then we allow those people to bring in husbands, wives, children, parents. This just continues on and on.

According to the research it takes 12 acres of undeveloped land to be developed for each new person. That figure remains constant regardless of whether they are native born, legal or illegal. So where do we get the resources to take care of all these people? Estimates also show that if we amnesty the people who are here and allow them to bring their families, the US population will increase by another 100 million in the next 50/60 years. That includes the immigrant children and their children.

Now suppose we allow this unending population increase. Would you like Montana’s population to become that of California or New York? Would you be willing to allow your rivers and lakes to be drained to feed the southern population? How about the housing? How much of your forests would be left after needing lumber to build housing for another 100 million? America is like a life boat. Eventually it will take on too many people and capsize.

Now perhaps you have been to the southern border of the US, perhaps not. But let me tell you many parts of it you wouldn’t recognize as being part of America. There are entire towns with third world health and crime issues. Now it is easy when you are up in the north to say anyone who wants to control the southern border is a racist. It is easy call a person a bigot because they want illegal aliens to be repatriated to their home countries. That is because you are not living with it on a day to day basis and are uninformed. How many rural Montana ranchers would put up with their livestock being killed, fences and buildings destroyed, their property being trashed by an influx of illegal border crossers? Property owners along the Mexican border put up with it everyday. Many have to carry a loaded sidearm when traveling on their own property. There have been over 200 documented incursions of armed Mexican Army soldiers on US soil. Some close to border ranches. How would you feel about if if it was happening on your property or in your neighborhood?

Margot mentioned how she was once illegal. Did she come here and start waving the Canadian flag? Did she demand that we change our laws to accommodate her? Did she expect us to publish and speak her language if different from English? The answer is probably no. The only similarities between an illegal coming from Canada and an illegal from Mexico/South America is the fact they are illegal. Canadian culture, much like European culture is much more like American culture. Canadians, Aussies, Europeans assimilate faster and easier because in most instances we share ancestry and language. Now some people want to make this issue a race issue. It isn’t, it is a cultural issue. Culturally most Hispanic illegals do not want to become Americans, they do not want to assimilate. They want us to make concessions for them!

Now why do people generally think of Hispanics when illegal immigration is discussed? It is because most of the illegals in this country are Hispanic. They are not European, Canadian or Asian. Here are some interesting facts:

According to a Pew Hispanic Center report, Mexicans make up 57 percent of the undocumented immigrants. Another 24 percent are from other Latin American countries. Approximately 9 percent are from Asia, 6 percent from Europe and Canada, with the remaining 4 percent from the rest of the world.

According to Bear Stearn report in 2005 there are at least 20 million illegals in this country. That includes the 50,000 plus Irish illegals that should be deported.

Illegals cost US tax payers more then the Iraq War. I won’t post all the relevant info, but you can Google it.

And please Judy don’t repeat that tired argument of jobs Americans won’t do. Americans have and do every job imaginable. Turn on the boob tube and watch Dirty Jobs. It is just that Americans won’t live 3 families to a single house to make their employer richer. They won’t work for slave wages. And by the way, no one at the top of the anti illegal immigration movement has ever suggested rounding up illegal aliens. That is a straw man argument. Even though that option would work, President Eisenhower did it in the 50s. Most including me support a policy of attrition thru enforcement. Enforce the current laws and most illegals will find it too difficult to stay. They will go home on their own.

Of course we’re up against greed and human nature and we have been for as long as people have been on this earth, so we should stop looking for solutions Brad? Come on, don’t be so defeatist. If Hightower is right that desperate people won’t stop coming until they can feed their families by staying home in Mexico or Honduras, Guatemala, etc. then let’s start having a discussion about our foreign policy which buys elites and bullies countries to accept the marvels of NAFTA, CAFTA, the IMF, and debt slavery. All of these things have, in the last twenty-five years hollowed out their economies and left their people with few alternatives but to work in sweatshops that pay five dollars a day, sell tacos on the street or make the long trek through the desert to a place where they live in fear, are worked like dogs, and abused by Americans who think they’re better then immigrants. I bet Brad, you’d even agree, that you have to be really desperate to make that choice.

I agree with Brad on one thing: the political cowardice of most politicians in both major parties who compete with each other to see who can be more abusive to immigrants rather than look at the real problems we face which have nothing to do with immigrants, problems like health care, declining wages (which started way before the immigrant surge), climate change, and corporate control of just about everything.

Brad, politicians and people like Chris Simcox don’t want to open this can of worms so they take the lazy way out and blame the immigrants, build a wall and don’t ever reform our broken, outdated immigration law. Brad adds that we should punish employers even more than they already are (what’s two times zero?)

So say you get your way and all the undocumented suddenly get wafted across the borders (Actually you should waft a bunch over the oceans and our northern border since there are hundreds of thousands of unauthorized workers from Canada, Poland, Ireland and other places who are white and somehow never mentiond.) So say 10-12 million undocumented MEXICANS are gone. Who is going to do the work? Who is going to clean the hotel rooms, wash the dishes, cut the lawns, build the wall, and pick your tomatoes? Is anyone in the Tancredo camp even thinking about this question while they call the people who provide them with their fresh veggies and clean sheets criminals? No. The Tancredos have poisoned the dialogue so much that we can’t even have that conversation and come up with a sane, workable immigration policy.

That would be AMNESTY you say. God forbid someone who commits the civil infraction of being here without papers gets to settle their case. We wouldn’t do that for a traffic violator which is a similar infraction. God forbid the few dozen people who we actually catch red handed in the act of setting foot in the US without authorization and who are therefore guilty of a federal MISDEMEANOR should never get out of jail or get to pay their fine because that would be AMNESTY. If any path to legalization is considered amnesty (which is what Tancredo, Sensenbrenner, Lou Dobbs and their ilk all say), if you rule out any resolution,. then there’s no way any one of these millions can get authorized to be here and work then we just have to deport them all and have huge sweeps through my community and yours to round them up and hold them in jail while they have hearings and put all their citizen kids in foster homes (or do we lock them up too?) and then send all or most them away and who will do their jobs? Do you really think those same greedy employers will voluntarily hire Americans and pay higher wages without enforcing our also very broken labor laws? In fact, a realistic scenario is that those jobs which are moveable will follow the deportees, just like a number of ag business jobs already have. They might go into our prisons where there’s lots of cheap labor, or they may just go under the table where even more desperate near slaves who get over, under or around the wall or who evade the roundups will work completely off the books and in the shadows, cheaper and not even paying taxes on phony social security numbers. That’s a realistic prediction of what Brad’s solution would bring. And is this the kind of society we want to become? Maybe we should just make anyone who looks like he or she might be here without documents wear their green card on their shirt so we don’t needlessly profile the innocent.

I think it would be far more realistic to face up to the elites of all our countries and tell them we want a sensible approach to labor which protects our rights and the rights of migrants and which forces those elites to share some of the vast wealth they’ve accumulated in this age of globalization. Brad is right, elites won’t do that voluntarily. That’s why we need a movement which includes us and Mexicans and Central Americans, and hopefully the Canadians, Poles and Irish as well which is strong enough to force the elites to change. Who knows, it’s happened before, in the 1930s and again in the 1960s, and that’s no pipe dream.