el crispito

Actually, Wooldridge is not the only one to get worked up about the billboard. It has raised the blood pressure of many white folks who seem to have nothing more to do than complain about illegal immigrants 'invading' their country.

The arguments of such modern-day critics need never reflect on the fact that their country gained most of the land in question by what can at best be called an exploitation of a cash-strapped Mexico after the Mexican-American War, or that before that it was taken from the Native Americans by force. Nor will you ever hear outrage over the fact that many Mexican-American citizens lost their lands during the 1850s to mostly Anglo squatters thanks to a law that required the legitimate owners to validate their land grants in direct contradiction to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. In reality, what's done is done. There is no way to undo past unfairness, even if such events were found to violate the law in our contemporary courts. There are probably better battles out there than the ones history has already decided and about which time has erased the details. But let's not make out like whitey has always been so noble.

There is one central focus in the argument of these folks: Mexicans are invading the country. Yet Wooldridge sees their destruction ranging far beyond the mere loss of low-paying jobs. He also claims illegal immigrants from Mexico have:

• run Americans out of countless cities and communities
• "trashed" school systems
• bankrupted 86 hospitals
• trashed the park systems
• defied laws by not carrying car insurance
• failed to obtain driver’s licenses
• neglected paying taxes by working off the books
• "brutalized" American schools with their language
• spread drugs
• spread tuberculosis and hepatitis into Los Angeles

He goes on to note that 800,000 Californians left the state last year, and implies that they all left for places like Idaho, Montana, Washington, Oregon, South Dakota, Colorado and Nevada in an attempt to outrun the invading horde.

Imagine Americans fleeing to safer places in their own country because of a foreign nation’s citizens invading our country!

Wooldridge works very hard to avoid being called a racist. He does not blame la raza for these problems. He blames immigration. Illegal immigration. The fact is, the most salient group of illegal immigrants in the country today consists of Mexicans. There is no avoiding that fact.

After the litany of aforementioned grievances, the article continues to cite examples of murders and rape committed by "illegals," and shows that even politicians are complicit in this "Mexicanization of America." Here he raises an important point, but fails to follow through: the politicians do nothing to stem illegal immigration. But why is that?

Politicians know what's up. They know that illegal immigration provides cheap labor to a variety of employers that can pay minimum wage (or less) without fear of complaint, that even illegal immigrants pay sales taxes and that if the American public doesn't make the connection, it will continue to subsidize all the costs associated, not so much with illegal immigration, but with simply having more people in your country using entitlements who are not contributing their fair share to the pot.

Don't blame Mexicans for that though. Only legal workers pay certain infrastructure taxes, and the government isn't handing out enough green cards to meet the demand. Not the demand of Mexicans, but the demand of business. That way politicians can claim to be trying to protect American jobs, but by turning a blind eye to illegal labor, they can continue to allow businesses to avoid meeting the requirements we have in place to protect legal workers.

And still the idea persists that if people are granted citizenship they suddenly get more expensive. But if illegal immigrants are already getting free health care and education, getting away with driving uninsured and filling up American job openings, the "real" Americans are paying for that. It would be in our best interest if we admit that illegal immigration has big economic implications that don't jive with our current legal schema. Only then can we approach it openly and deal with it effectively. But that would raise very sticky moral issues that we'd have to figure out and it would weaken the effectiveness of a certain social scapegoat.

You see, as Wooldridge puts it, "Over 10 million illegal Mexicans overwhelm us, kills us, rape us, rape our welfare and hospitals, steal jobs from our poorest Americans and destroy our schools with their language which they refuse to relinquish. "

Yeah, sure. But bear in mind that the FBI statistics show that 59.7 percent of all violent crime arrestees are white, with blacks comprising 38.0 percent, and other races, 2.3 percent. And there are a few other things that some people refuse to give up that are costing this country a lot more than people speaking Spanish.