I haven't seen the movie yet, so will simply say this:

I hate it when they get the history wrong, but I can live with it if it's basically accurate. And if they pull off the essential truth in a memorable way, good for them. I was hugely impressed by the trailer's shot of the Spanish Armada, a terrifying sight from the viewpoint of an Englishmen watching it from the south coast of England.

Of course, the truth is that, despite some harassing attacks by the English which helped things along, those galleons, unmaneuverable as they were, were doomed as soon as they turned into the English channel. They eventually had to let themselves be blown all the way through, and then they had to double back by going north of Scotland and meeting new disaster off Ireland, losing ships all the way to the elements. If the film lets some of that truth come in along with crediting the English, it will do. If the event is just a chorus of "Hail Britannia", that chapter of the movie fails.

These new sanctions against "sanctuary cities" are but the latest manifestation of a racist anti-Mexican mob in full-throated cry so loud as to drown out the calls that they themselves created the mess.

Let us now frankly admit that racism drives this issue. Lots of Canadians slip into the U.S. to make a life here, but we get hysterical only about the dirty little brown Mexicans. Poke one of those "English only" people and you don't hear bitching about Vietnamese or Hindu or even French, just Spanish. When the Mexicans began singing our national anthem in Spanish, you would have thought they were singing the Internationale. The talk of their taking jobs from Americans is just insane, given that no one wants the jobs they take. All these points are indicia of racism, staring us right in the face, which we would easily identify as such if Mexicans were black. It's time to own up to it, and for Democrats to start saying it. They won't, however, because they are deferring to the racist majority.

Conservatives try to slide by this obvious racism on grounds that there is massive illegality, and on principle -- support of the rule of law, tut tut -- they rise to high dudgeon in support of drastic measures, as though millions of them didn't cheat on their taxes.

This ploy helps them get over the mountain of hypocrisy they stand on. It was the business constituents of conservative (and liberal) Congressmen who prevailed on them, some with state governors in hand, to persuade two presidents, Clinton and Bush, to dial back prosecutions of employers to zero. As prosecutions fell, illegal immigration rose exponentially. That is how this problem happened, pure and simple: our leaders did not enforce the law when doing so would have dried up the job market for illegals and stopped the flood at the border.

Fortunately, the solution is obvious to anyone who can get past racism and hypocrisy. We don't need a Mexican Wall, or a border army, or any other such new remedy to deal with this situation. We just need to enforce the 1986 law penalizing employers for hiring illegals.

Bush has now decreed such enforcement, and the employers are fighting back, ostensibly in behalf of the workers, a charade that is amusing to worker advocates. But recent history has shown that when such enforcement is present, the illegals pack up and leave. The criminals won't, so sure, let's arrest and prosecute them. The rest need no such heavy hand.

Of course, once they are gone we may wish they hadn't. Their jobs will have to be filled by raising wages high enough to attract workers. It always works, without fail. Or are the conservative businessmen now going to say the free market does not work? In another giant example of hypocrisy, they do say something like that, the bottom line being that the market is OK for soybeans, but not for human beings.

They are exactly right, but take exactly the wrong conclusion from that. What the workers deserve is a "humanity premium" above the market rate to allow them to live decently, a proper minimum wage instead of the political compromise we have that passes for one. What the employers want to give them is a little bit above subsistence, even if that is below what the market would pay. They justify that because wages in Mexico for competitive products coming in under NAFTA are lower. That is, they can't fight the market price of tomatoes, but they can jam down the wages to produce them. Thus does man become less worthy than a vegetable.

That is the same rationale as slavery, and but one step up from it. Which is exactly where the racist, hypocritical mob hounding our Mexican workers wants them to be.