What a crock of shit that is. Spend a month in Arizona and then tell me it ain’t about Mexicans.

That has increasingly become the case as US states have reduced the services provided to undocumented immigrants (driver’s licenses, in particular), but only in the last decade. Most Mexicans only contact with their consulate is to get a matricula consular, the official unofficial ID of undocumented Mexicans in the US that is now widely accepted by US businesses. What else do the consulates provide? Nothing else, that I am aware of.

“The main argument that our economy no longer assimilates unskilled and uneducated workers in the way that it did a century ago is absolutely vital”

A dubious argument, at best. Is it just coincidence that the greatest periods of economic growth in the US coincide with the greatest periods of immigration? And what is unskilled labor? Carpentry, masonry, and welding are important skills in the US that are in high demand and are not being filled by native workers. Unemployment rates among undocumented Mexicans are also very low.

Finally, by most every quantitative measure, assimilation is occurring at traditional rates, maybe even faster thanks to modern media. Statistically speaking, the Mexican immigrant that comes to the US speaks no English and will probably not learn the language in any significant way. His children will be fluent in English, with many being unable to speak Spanish in any significant way. By the third generation, half the grandchildren will marry a non-latino person. Hard to see how you can quicken the pace of assimilation. A first generation immigrant has always had trouble learning the language and has always clung to his old culture, nothing new there.

PS Good point on legal v. illegal immigration. From an economic standpoint, there is no distinction.

However, I don’t think you can win this argument against what I call the “peasant-ification of America” (this includes all ethnicities and points of origin, not just Mexicans/Central Americans) unless you find a “bleeding-heart” angle. Fortunately, Mexico’s central banker has offered just such an angle: Mexico need’s its American-trained workers back.

[via The Big Picture] “What’s really hurting the [Mexican] economy is that less money is being sent home from workers living abroad. And by abroad, you can probably guess what country I mean. Speaking of which, Ortiz also favors, sit down for this one, stricter immigration controls in the U.S. so Mexico can hold on to its workers. Ortiz said, ‘I think Mexico needs its people. It would be best to keep its people in Mexico, and it would give incentives for Mexico to create the jobs that are needed.’ Increíble!”

Maybe in some ways this is a case of accidental benevolence. We’ve provided Mexico with a huge infusion of dollars via its expatriot workers. More than any bailout or “aid package” could have provided. Now, maybe we owe it to Mexico to return those laborers, who only pass for semi-skilled (at best) north of the Rio Bravo but are in the first tier of blue collar laborers by Mexican standards. What if we are stymying Mexico’s future by not sending them back?