Mojado by Ricardo Arjona

A friend on Facebook shared this music video with me, and I thought MoE was the perfect place for it.

Poll: Most Think Undocumented Immigrants Should Be Allowed to Stay

This chart from Pew is interesting:

Pew Pie Chart

Click on the image to see the whole report.

For what it's worth, I don't think citizenship should automatically be granted to anyone who is allowed into the US, and I'm not so sure it should be automatically granted to everyone already living here, or everyone born here.  I think there needs to be a discussion about what citizenship means, what it should mean, and how it should be earned.  My concern with immigration and this blog is with individual rights; people's right to live where they please, trade with whom they please, and employ or work for whom they please.

Immigration Quote

"The secret to America's wealth is that we were settled by restless, driven, overconfident, risk-taking dreamers. America is an amazing natural experiment -- a continent populated largely by self-selected immigrants. All these people had the get-up-and-go to pull up stakes and come here, a temperament that made them different from their friends and relatives who stayed home. Immigrants are the original venture capitalists, risking their human capital -- their lives -- on a dangerous and arduous voyage into the unknown." "...immigrants are self-employed at much higher rates than native-born people, regardless of what nation they emigrate to or from. And the rate of entrepreneurial activity in a nation is correlated with the number of immigrants it absorbs." John Gartner, Washington Post

Can We Really Expect Meaningful Reform from Republicans?

The author of this article seems to get it, but the comments below it leave me feeling a bit sick to my stomach. As a Facebook friend said, "You want to see what the GOP base looks like? When free markets are brought up as the solution to immigration, look at the comments on this article. No this is not a Neo-Nazi website, its a conservative one. These are the so-called ambassadors to the Hispanic community."

Here's a clip from the article:

…I add this exhortation to my GOP brethren: If you see your problem with immigrants as merely one of marketing, then you will not succeed. The nativist wing of the party is not just politically inconvenient, it is morally and economically wrong. The point is not to capitulate to political necessity; the point is to have the right policy. The right policy is a growing economy, non-burdensome immigration laws, a welfare system which promotes work, not dependency, and a culture of assimilation, not isolation.

And some comments:

"Latinos are religious, morally conservative and tend disproportionately to join the military and start businesses. They are natural members of the conservative coalition."
No, no, no. Let's march them all to the border (remember the Bataan death march) and tell them cross over or bang, bang. I am so tired of walking into every store, walking down every street and feeling like I'm in another country. Illegal invader problem solved.

and…

Why is townhall allowing leftwing TRAITORS to parrot their anti-American pro-illegals propaganda on their website? I've seen them allowing Linda Chavez and other RINOs do so as well.
Anyone with an IQ above that of a turnip should be able to figure out that if we give the INVADERS amnesty, that will only encourage still more of them to come here.
The ONLY way we will stop them from coming and get rid of those already here:
MAKE THINGS SO TOUGH ON THEM here that they self-deport back to Mexico, etc. at their own expense because they get to hate it here so much.
We can't afford to deport 20 million foreign nationals. Plus most would only come right back.

I can understand why Republicans don't like the stereotypical college professor in this country. Most of them are statist pigs with a left-wing agenda, and few seem generally interested in educating young Americans, much less teaching them how to think, but this anti-intellectual wing of the conservative movement, that seems to be spreading like wildfire, is disgusting, at best. Ignorance is not a value to the Republicans should be promoting if they wish to win future elections.