Richard Linklater’s recent film Fast Food Nation is one of the most powerful and graphic recent films dealing with the topic of illegal immigration. The film reminds me of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. However, in Fast Food Nation, the workers depicted often have the addition issues of being illegal aliens.

Fast Food Nation does not take a stand on how immigration policy ought to be handled. It does deal extensively with themes like:

• The use of drugs to control illegal alien workers
• The actual process of illegal immigration(and involvement of Coyotes).
• The sexual exploitation of illegal aliens by corporate managers.
• The alienation of American youth in a situation in which they have few job opportunities in which they see any real future or meaning.
• The use of illegal immigration to facilitate cruelty to animals.
• The role of corrupt attorneys in helping corporations exploit the labor of illegal aliens
• The allegation that illegal immigration encourages unsafe working conditions
• The allegation that illegal immigration can facilitate public health risks through an unsafe food supply.

I bought this film used for $6.67 my local video store. I’d encourage folks that enjoy films that are concerned about illegal immigration to add this video to your library. It will bring up a lot of discussion points-and it is a film that you could loan to even a liberal friend.

I tend to think that the most graceful way we get ourselves out of the illegal immigration mess is by a transitional phase of allowing existing folks temporary work visas, tightening the borders and gradually improving working conditions, legal rights and visa fees for workers such that use of guest worker labor gradually become less and less profitable for corporations to use. I also expect at some point, we’ll need campaigns to boycott companies that use illegal alien labor-but package this program so that it isn’t a disaster for Mexico and our other Latin neighbors.

The left has a much more successful track record of those kinds of boycotts than the right has–and films like Fast Food Nation are the means by which the left is starting to become conscious of the issue of illegal immigration. We need a lot more cultural material to start to really address the issue of illegal immigration and Fast Food Nation is a start.

Robert X. Cringley writes at PBS:

The IBM project I am writing about is called LEAN and the first manifestation of LEAN was this week’s 1,300 layoffs at Global Services, which generated almost no press. Thirteen hundred layoffs from a company with more than 350,000 workers is nothing, so the yawning press reaction is not unexpected. But this week’s “job action,” as they refer to it inside IBM management, was as much as anything a rehearsal for what I understand are another 100,000+ layoffs to follow, each dribbled out until some reporter (that would be me) notices the growing trend, then dumped en masse when the jig is up, but no later than the end of this year.

The article concludes:

It is especially disconcerting for an action of this scale to take place at a time when many companies (including IBM) are complaining about a shortage of technical workers to justify a proposed expansion of H1B and other guest worker visa programs. What’s wrong with all those U.S. IBM engineers that they can’t fill the local technical labor demand? They can’t be ALL bad: after all, they were hired by IBM in the first place and retained for years.

What is unstated in this H1B aspect of the story is not that technical workers are unavailable but that CHEAP technical workers are unavailable. Lopping off half the technical staff, as Global Services is apparently about to do, will eliminate much of the company’s traditional wisdom and corporate memory in an act that some people might label as age discrimination.

The basic problem is that IBM is a major corporate welfare recipient. That is the type of thing that can be sustained for a company that is creating US jobs. However, I don’t see any reason for the US government to dole out that kind of sugar to what is essentially an Indian company. For that matter, the patents, copyrights IBM and the other large H-1b users hold can be quite easily nationalized.

There are lots of American companies around that can utilize virtually any non-proprietary technology. You don’t see a lot of H-1b use at Redhat for example. I also think it is high time that we look seriously into treason charges for the senior managers, investment analysts and major investors that have created this mess.

Remember Jorge Castaneda, Vicente Fox’s first foreign minister, who demanded “the whole enchilada?” Though out of the Mexican government since 2003, Castaneda is still telling us what to do. On May 8th, he was in San Antonio giving a speech to university students and said of immigration:

“This is the single most important issue in Mexico by far. Nothing else even approaches it.”

The single most important issue? It’s rather incredible for you to say that the single most important issue in your country is getting people out of it!

Castaneda also predicted that failure to reach an immigration accord will strengthen anti-Americans in Mexico:

“It will give voice to the very anti-U.S., very anti-democracy, very anti-globalization interests. It will give them something to point to.”

How many times have we heard this tired line before?

When Vicente Fox was president of Mexico, we were told that we had to give him what he wanted on immigration or the anti-Americans would take over.

During the 2006 Mexican election, Dick Morris hysterically warned us that if we don’t surrender on immigration, Calderon would lose the election and Hugo Chavez would take over Mexico!

We didn’t, Calderon won anyway, and Hugo Chavez was never on the verge of taking over Mexico anyway.

We shouldn’t run our immigration policy to help or hinder political forces in Mexico. Let Mexicans choose their own leaders and make their own decisions , and let’s run our own immigration policy.

JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS, Associated Press writes:

President Bush, promoting bipartisan immigration talks as they reach a critical stage, said Saturday that Republicans and Democrats are building consensus that could produce a bill this year.

“I am optimistic we can pass a comprehensive immigration bill and get this problem solved for the American people this year,” Bush said in his weekly radio address.

Bush’s Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and Commerce Secretary
Carlos Gutierrez are involved and Teddy Kennedy is playing a major role:

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., thanked Bush for “addressing the nation on this critical issue and emphasizing the common goals that we share.

“The American people will be watching and waiting to see if the Senate can come together on immigration reform and strike the right balance between strengthening our security and our economy and enacting laws that uphold the humanity and dignity of those who come here seeking a better life,” Kennedy said.

Now, what does bipartisan really mean? Only a fairly small portion of the electorate in the US really supports increase of immigration. In the Pew Report,Beyond Red and Blue, these were called the “Liberals”, “Enterprisers” and the “Upbeats”–the wealthiest voting blocks in the US.

Now, I suspect that Bush really can maintain his hold on the GOP. The Republican Party has never been particularly dDemocratic since its inception. The major changes have related to who controlled the purse strings there.

The Democrats are another matter. There simply isn’t the depth of real estate wealth among major Democratic activists we see in the GOP. The Democratic convention is run on the basis of proportional representation–which means that a lot of rather disparate groups can get a foothold there.

The “immigration reform” being proposed here has supporters –and opponents–in both parties. The question here is whether either party can get real on immigration. I tend to think it is more likely that will be the Democrats for the simple reason that party is more democratic and thus has to be somewhat responsive to its membership/activists.

The GOP leadership can beat the war drums on issues like abortion and prayer in the public schools. The thing is, those issues are likely to fade in importance pretty rapidly for folks who are having real problems making ends meet.