I think I mentioned this in passing above. If several hundred men start to congregate in Midwest parking lots, men who are in the country illegally and are looking to be hired illegally, then they will be rounded up by the local police and turned over to the INS.

If you read Mr. van der Leun’s essay, I think you will see that he is wishing for some good old fashioned Midwest law enforcement himself…

“If local authorities or border control officials really wanted to cut back on illegals, they’d just sweep these areas. But local political institutions and local police — and all of us too — seem to have agreed to lay off these zones.”

I think that Mr. van der Leun has hit on the root of his problem in that paragraph fragment. “But local political institutions and local police…”

James

You mean La Raza?

Nawwwww… Can’t happen. They’re good little beaners who mean no harm.

*snort*

(to anyone offended by “beaner” — trust me, I’m much more offended by La Raza, which is the *only* reason I used the term. I’ll worry more about offending other groups when their own basic terms for people –anyone– outside their group don’t also happen to translate to things like “barbarian”, or “devil”, etc.)

.

The vast majority of Mexicans in the US are very hardworking conservative people. Lot’s of their bad folks come up too, because there are easy picking and few penalties. But that’s another issue. I doubt we’ll see a lot of violence from Mexicans. The greater risk is to Mexico itself.

In case you missed it, the housing market started to crash about a year ago. But unemployment never rose. Why? They all went back to Mexico. They may have a hard time getting a job there, but they’ve saved a lot of dollars and they’re still the richest guys in the village. They’ll hang out till we need them again and then they’ll be back. Even in those midwestern meat and poultry packing plants.

If that is so, where’s my paycheck?

I’ve not worked as a “professional communicator” since 2002.

I just wanted to add to G van der Leun’s observations that he didn’t look into the root of the problem: why his friend, as majority of homeowners in Marin C. prefer to hire illegals for $85 per day, rather than their perfect-English-speaking American workers? The reason they don’t talk about it is this: American workers will charge for the same job 2 or 3 times more. Not only because they pay taxes off their earning, but because majority of those workers are unionized and they HAVE to charge 3 times more, by Union’s rules. The construction/landscape market in the US is distorted by the rigid Union policies and protectionism by local politicians. It is more beneficial for a union worker to “seat on a bench” and do nothing in case they can’t get any work, than to break Union rules and lower their rates in order to compete with the illegals. This is what causes the whole unhealthy chain of events.

One February in Austin, it rained (IIRC) 23 days in a row. On about day 20 I was sitting in a coffee shop in a mall reading the local newspaper. From my vantage I could see out the mall entrance into the completely flooded mall parking lot. The water filled the lot up to the tops of curb. It had rained so hard for so long that the drainage system could not drain the slopped lot fast enough. All this time, however, California was bone dry for nearly two years.

I turned my attention from the flooded parking lot and back to the newspaper. I opened up the “Lifestyles” section to see a cluster of stories about saving water, all of them quoting people from California. I released then how the media worked. If California or New York had a problem, then the rest of the country did as well.

I grew up reading Sunset Magazine (and the architecture school at UC Berkeley when I was there had a program once on “De-Sunsetizing Your Garden”)

The info on Ohio illegal immigration (such as that information is) is here (yes, from FAIR, but who else keeps track of this stuff?): http://www.fairus.org/site/PageServer?pagename=research_research0583

I am pleased that the silliness of “sanctuary cities” has not spread to Ohio, but from what I read illegal immigration has spread well beyond the border states (not that it is an exact proxy, but look at the growth of Spanish as a first language students in North Carolina, for example).

Your reaction may also be leading to the same comments we have noticed about the Iowa floods vs. the New Orleans floods. “Middle America” (for lack of a better term) _is_ more self-reliant. Perhaps that is also related to the “homogeniety=higher social trust” that Robert Putnam has noticed – California is now a minority-majority state, so while homogeniety may not be what it once was in Ohio, it is pretty much gone in California.

That’s at the heart of some of the criticism of the media we make on this site.

“I imagine we are both victims of that common modern disorder, the illusion of central position.”

You might very well be right, but I’m willing to wager that a greater number of Americans experience conditions similar to what I see every day.

James