Mexican highways have checkpoints manned by the Mexican Army. I’ve passed through a number of them, and I’ve never tried to run through one without stopping. I just don’t think it’d be prudent.

However, in the Gulf coast state of Veracruz, the driver of a van attempted to run through a combined Army/Police checkpoint. He didn’t get far, as the soldiers and police opened fire on the vehicle. The driver escaped on foot.

When the soldiers opened the van they found 35 Central American illegal aliens inside. One of them, a Honduran (from a country poorer than Mexico) was wounded.

Can you imagine the outcry if something like this happened in the U.S.?

Here are what some of the Republican pundits are saying about the horrible immigration bill:

Deroy Murdock’s syndicated column says

Americans who want secure borders wonder why the 700-mile southern-frontier-fence Congress authorized last year stretches only 370 miles under McCain-Kennedy.
And liberals fret that this bill’s guest-worker program would depress the wages of low-skilled American citizens. This is a serious, albeit debatable, accusation.
By pushing this bill, John McCain is alienating GOP primary voters. Come 2008, he may become one lonely maverick. Meanwhile, by embracing this legislation, President Bush is smashing his loyal Republican base to smithereens. McCain-Kennedy is as wildly popular as algebra homework on prom night. Congress should drop kick it into the Rio Grande.[Bedlam awaits this immigration bill , By Deroy Murdock, Indianapolis Star, May 25, 2007]

Peggy Noonan writes in the Wall Street Journal an article which features all kinds of love and affection for immigrants. (Ms. Noonan, unfortunately, has a heart as big as all outdoors. There have been a number of complaints about it.) But after telling happy stories about immigrants, she calls for tough border enforcement, a moratorium, and the defeat of the horrible Bush-Kennedy bill.

Naturally I hope the new immigration bill fails. It is less a bill than a big dirty ball of mischief, malfeasance and mendacity, with a touch of class malice, and it’s being pushed by a White House that is at once cynical and inept. The bill’s Capitol Hill supporters have a great vain popinjay’s pride in their own higher compassion. They are inclusive and you’re not, you cur, you gun-totin’ truckdriver’s-hat-wearin’ yahoo. It’s all so complex, and you’d understand this if you weren’t sort of dumb.

……….

Let’s take time and find out if the immigrants who are here see their wages click up and new benefits kick in as the endless pool stops expanding. It would be good to see them gain. Let’s find out if it’s true that Americans won’t stoop to any of the jobs illegals do. I don’t think it is. Years ago I worked in a florist shop removing the thorns from roses. It was painful work and I was happy to do it, and I am very American. I was a badly paid waitress in the Holiday Inn on Route 3 in New Jersey.

The young will do a great deal, and not only the young. The dislike for Americans evinced by the Americans-won’t-do-hard-work crowd is, simply, astonishing, and shameful. It says more about the soft and ignorant lives they lived in Kennebunkport and Greenwich than it does about the American people.
[Slow Down and Absorb Open borders? Mass deportations? How about some common sense instead? May 25, 2007 ]

And finally, John Podhoretz, asked to choose between destroying America and fighting Iraq, chooses Iraq. His idea is that if Bush hurts his base, and the Congressional Republicans this badly, he’ll lose an Iraq funding vote. In the New York Post, he writes thsi article, with a picture of the president, and the caption:“W: To avoid Iraq retreat, needs a united Republican Party. “

Bush needs a unified Republican Party going into the fall, which may be the most difficult moment of his presidency. The most likely scenario is that Gen. David Petraeus will report modest to substantial improvements in the war in Iraq, but not definitively enough to fend off Democratic efforts to use his report as a key occasion to end the war.

The president must have his own party in his corner at that time. And yet the party is on the verge of self-immolation over immigration. Passage of the bill would drain most of the remaining affection and respect for Bush from Republicans on Capitol Hill, who would have to deal with the populist fallout from the bill’s passage.

He needs all the help he will get. And he will lose a lot of help.

What’s astonishing about the bill’s arrival is that the White House knows perfectly well it’s political poison. In 2004 Bush first announced his immigration reform plans, and the response from the Republican base was so violent that he immediately tabled the subject. [ BETTER OFF LOSING BUSH CAN'T AFFORD IMMIGRATION VICTORY May 25, 2007]

Podhoretz really likes immigration, and really hates immigration restrictionists. He’d like this bill to pass but he recognizes that it will be suicidal for the Republican Party. What he doesn’t realize is that it would be equally suicidal for America.

Julie Hirschfeld Davis writes at Associated Press

WASHINGTON - Democrats are seeking to slash the number of foreign workers who could come to the U.S. on temporary visas as the Senate prepares for another day of freewheeling debate over a bipartisan immigration measure.

A Republican proposal to crack down on illegal border crossers with mandatory prison sentences also was to be discussed Wednesday, as leaders in both parties sought to alter elements of the broad agreement that are drawing criticism from their core supporters.

The measure would toughen border security, give quick legal status to the estimated 12 million immigrants in the country unlawfully and create a new workplace verification system to bar undocumented workers from getting jobs.

It would create a point system for future immigration applicants that would place less emphasis on family connections and more on education and skills in demand by U.S. businesses.

This could get interesting if the GOP and Democrats start to compete on how to tighten up immigration. What is notably lacking is any attempt to enforce existing penalties against employers–and to stiffen those penalties to the point they’d actually be an effective deterrent.

The author is acting like this is a get tough bill–but when immigration rights are so very valuable, and the penalties for the employers profiting from illegal immigration are so lax, there will be plenty of poor people with nothing to loose willing to take the risk.

This is Ann Coulter’s latest column, quoting Peter Brimelow’s Spectator article of last year:

The only beneficiaries of these famed hardworking immigrants – unlike you lazy Americans – are the wealthy, who want the cheap labor while making the rest of us chip in for the immigrants’ schooling, food and health care.

These great lovers of the downtrodden – the downtrodden trimming their hedges – pretend to believe that their gardeners’ children will be graduating from Harvard and curing cancer someday, but 1) they don’t believe that; and 2) if it happened, they’d lose their gardeners.

Not to worry, Marie Antoinettes! According to Alien Nation author Peter Brimelow, “There is recent evidence that, even after four generations, fewer than 10 percent of Mexicans have post-high school degrees, as opposed to nearly half of non-Mexican-Americans.” [Mexican Wave, Spectator (UK), June 4, 2006]So you’ll always have the maid. As New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said, our golf fairways would suffer without illegal immigrants: “You and I both play golf; who takes care of the greens and the fairways on your golf course?” [Importing a Slave Class,May 24, 2007]

George Borjas has a new blog, and has an item called Sondheim on Migration:

Ever since I was first exposed to the music from West Side Story as a teenager, some of Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics stuck with me. They appear in the song America. In the movie version, Bernardo and Rita are arguing over the costs and benefits of migrating from Puerto Rico to New York.

BERNARDO: I think I’ll go back to San Juan

ANITA: I know a boat you can get on

BERNARDO: Everyone there will give big cheer

ANITA: Everyone there will have moved here

Given the huge volume of migration from Puerto Rico to the United States in the 1950s, it is not surprising that Sondheim expected Puerto Rico to empty out. But the fact is that it didn’t. And therein lies one of the great unsolved puzzles in the study of migration. There are no legal restrictions whatsoever that hamper the mobility of Puerto Ricans to the mainland–they are American citizens by birth–and transportation costs are low. Yet here we are, 60 years on (to use an Elton John song title) from the onset of Puerto Rican migration after World War II, and there are still quite a few people left in Puerto Rico. Why hasn’t Puerto Rico emptied out?

I’ve done a couple of items on Puerto Rico, and in Wall Street (Journal) Story, in 2001, I pointed out that while Michael Barone said that

Mexico’s population growth has slowed sharply: It will probably not need a big increase in the number of jobs and probably not generate such a large percentage of immigrants to the U.S. in the 2010s as it did in the 1990s. It is possible that the flows of people across the border will in time be in equilibrium, as the flow of people from Puerto Rico to the mainland U.S. has been since 1961.

the flow was not actually in equilibrium. According to the CIA World Factbook the net migration rate is -1.09 per 1000 population, meaning people are still leaving. (For comparison, the current official net immigration rate for the United States is +3.05 per 1000 population, and if that doesn’t sound like a lot, it helps to think of it as being like compound interest.)

Barone actually repeated this error in 2006, in a Wall Street Journal article called The Newest Americans, [April 11, 2006] which I blogged about here. But while Puerto Ricans are still coming to the mainland, some of them are staying home.

Borjas has two questions, one of which is “Why hasn’t Puerto Rico emptied out?,” and why is there still “a sizable income differential between the United States and Puerto Rico.” (In fact, the actual question he asks is “Whatever happened to the factor price equalization theorem?,” which is too technical for me.)

I have only non-economic to suggest, but one reason for not leaving Puerto Rico is that there’s “no place like home,” and it must certainly not be crowded.

As for having lower incomes, planting the American flag on Puerto Rico in 1898 changed the government, but not the culture, which is basically Latin American. Culture takes a long time to change–Louisiana still has a Latin political tradition, 200 years after the Louisiana Purchase. Read the whole item for the technical details, and read Borjas’s blog here.

Via Hot Air, the Michelle Malkin video blog site, where one of the bloggers, (not Michelle) says

I shudder to think what Maureen Dowd and a million other hack pundits will do with this moronic yet irresistible omen-slash-metaphor. Click the image to watch.Hot Air » Blog Archive » Video: Sparrow craps on Bush during Rose Garden presser

Click on the picture to see the ABC Video, which has the sober title Bird Makes A Statement On Bush.

The “Omen Pigeon” pun is Spider Robinson’s. Serious Republican Party punditry to come, I promise.

Here at VDARE.COM, we reject the immigration legislation pending in the U.S. Senate, for obvious reasons.

But guess what? The Comisión Permanente of the Mexican Congress doesn’t like it either! Not for the same reasons we don’t, obviously .

The Comisión Permanente is a 37-member mini-Congress, which is in session during Mexican congressional recesses. (Mexican Constitution, Article 78).

This Comisión unanimously voted to exhort the Calderon Administration to express its rejection of the Kennedy-Bush bill.[Rechaza el Congreso controles migratorios Siglo de Torreon, May 24th, 2007 ]

Why don’t they like it?

Congressman Carlos Lozano de la Torre says it will cause more deaths and detentions of Mexicans trying to cross the border. The deaths are lamentable, but preventable. If Mexicans wouldn’t cross the border in desert areas, they wouldn’t die there.

Lozano also doesn’t like it because it supposedly de-emphasizes (for some future time, anyway) “family unification”.

The Green Party representative doesn’t like it because of the 5,000 fine (which we know will probably not be paid anyway).

What’s the lesson here? Mexican politicians will not be satisfied with anything less than open borders with full benefits for all Mexicans.

So why should we care what Mexican politicians say about our immigration policy anyway?

Gail Russell Chaddock writes at The Christian Science Monitor:

“People are going to be piling on their senators at public events, media events, and in their offices over the break,” predicts William Gheen, president of Americans for Legal Immigration PAC, based in Raleigh, N.C. “They can expect large angry mobs of their constituents. I’ve never seen this degree of disparity between lawmaker actions and the electorate.”

Nearly half of US voters oppose the proposed reform, and only 26 percent of US voters support it, according to a Rasmussen Reports poll this week.

Basically the GOP leaders are getting the message that immigration is a hot potato. What is sad is that these “leaders” aren’t really willing to talk to the folks that have seriously studied the issue of immigration–fund raising is a much higher priority than actual government.

If we are lucky the government will simply play dead for a while longer-and when they bring up amnesty again, it will be an even hotter issue than today.

In the long run, I fully expect that most of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas will no longer be part of the US. For many practical intents and purposes, they really aren’t now. When you consider the impact that will have on the psyche of Americans– California for much of our history was the epitome of the “American Dream”-it is truly intimidating.

A number of readers have sent in this article from Der Spiegel:

New [French] immigration minister, Brice Hortefeux, confirmed on Wednesday that the government is planning to offer incentives to more immigrants to return home voluntarily. “We must increase this measure to help voluntary return. I am very clearly committed to doing that,” Hortefeux said in an interview with RFI radio.

Under the scheme, Paris will provide each family with a nest egg of €6,000 ($8,000) for when they go back to their country of origin. A similar scheme, which was introduced in 2005 and 2006, was taken up by around 3,000 families.

Hortefeux, who heads up the new “super-ministery” of immigration, integration, national identity and co-development, said he wants to pursue a “firm but humane” immigration policy.

The new ministry was a central pledge in Nicolas Sarkozy’s election campaign, who had warned that France was exasperated by “uncontrolled immigration.”[France to Pay Immigrants to Return Home May 24, 2007]

I outlined a similar, although much more lucrative, program in two VDARE articles in 2005: first and second. I suggested that $25,000 per person would have a sizable effect.