Although many Eastern European countries are still very poor in comparison to their Western counterparts, their literacy rates are much higher. Poland, for example, scores a perfect 100%. Romania, 98%. Moldova, considered the poorest country in Europe, boasts 99% literacy (as good or better than the United States, by the way). Mexico, on the other hand, rings in at only 92%. The old socialist systems of Eastern Europe might not have given their citizens lots of fancy cars and consumer electronics, but they did provide them with excellent educations for the most part. In contrast, Mexico's brutal brand of feudal capitalism has left millions struggling with little or no education. Many Americans would be surprised to learn how many Mexicans cannot even read and write Spanish and speak it only as a second language (the Mayan language is a common first Mexican language, but there are many others). Eastern European immigrants to England, Ireland, or Sweden will be able to learn and adapt quickly to a variety of skilled tasks, but because of high illiteracy rates among Mexican immigrants to the US, many of our new arrivals are limited to simple manual tasks. That's not to say that they can't be a positive benefit to the economy here in the US, but to compare a Polish bartender that speaks three languages and has completed two years of calculus to the illiterate immigrant mowing your yard is unfair and misleading.

And let me add that the nations to which the Eastern Europeans are flocking have FAR less predatory economies and cultures. If someone struggles they won't find themselves living in the streets or "competing" with a gazillion others who can barely make it themselves. It's a significant difference.

This all seems to assume that border control between the U.S. and Mexico is working as-is, but that would be news to me... If we opened the border, I honestly doubt we'd notice any significant difference in migration rates.

If we're going to erase all borders, we have to start looking at the big picture, in both time and space: how are humans going to distribute themselves?

The big picture includes the whole world, for the forseeable future. How are six billion people going to distribute themselves today? How many will there be in fifty years? Five hundred years?

Lack of energy, clean water, clean air, natural beauty; all these plague us already. What are our plans for the future? Wait for the Rapture?

In the long run, births equal deaths. Until births equal deaths in the short run, people will continue to move.

Just look at any American city. You have the ghetto in one corner, the upscale section in the other, and the gentrified in between. You don't need any walls to keep the folks in their place. Social and economic forces do that just fine.

I guess the real fear is that the ghetto will grow. I'm not sure how you can prevent that. As long as you want people working for cheap, they gotta live and eat somewhere. As long as you don't reward them with free housing, child subsidies, and welfare for not working, though, they will be motivated to work their way out.

Also it's worth noting that family planning does more to prevent ghettos from growing than border police. Something for the right wing to think about.

We have no border with Mexico. These people cross our borders at will-thousands of them everyday. They cross illegally then have political clout in our country. They have powerful American interest supporting their interests,unions,big business,Wal-Mart to name one,the Catholic church,the Latino media,and powerful Latino advocates. They have advocates in Congress,both parties, and their best ally, the Mexican government. They have more political power than middle and working class American citizens. The American people are asleep,and their apathy has given them a government that has repeatedly sacrficed the American dream for the dream of corporate America-cheap labor. They enter the country illegally,then protest in our streets waving Mexican flags. It would take a vivid imagination to think we have a southern border.

Perhaps the greatest reason formation of the European Union decreased undocumented immigration there, and why we cannot expect anything of the sort to happen in North America is that before uniting, the wealthier European nations spent years investing in their poorer future partners' economies, improving their infrastructures (including the human infrastructure), raising their educational attainment and bringing their prevailing wages to levels much closer to those in the rich nations.

After that was done, when immigration barriers were lowered, Spaniards -- once the "illegals" that dominated the low-wage jobs in the wealthier nations -- returned to Spain because they could finally make decent livings in their homeland.

NAFTA, and now CAFTA, on the other hand, are built on a very different model that is built not on equality, but inequity. No efforts were made to "bring up" the poorer partners. Mexico -- and now, the Central American countries -- were only seen as sources of inexpensive labor that might be less productive, but where wages were cheap enough to make up for the lower productivity and then some.

So that Mexico and the Central American nations can sell their products in U.S. and Canadian markets, wages there are deliberately kept low, to make up for their lower productivity and to deliver products to export markets at tantalizingly competitive prices.

Mexico's northern border region now has that nation's highest prevailing wages, while the United State's southern border region continues to have this nation's lowest wages. Still, the prevailing wages in northern Mexico are between 10 percent and 12 percent of what is paid on the U.S. side of the border.

And it is no secret that the easiest way to keep wages low is to keep unemployment high, which is, essentially what is happening.

Is it any wonder, then, that the unemployed of Mexico and Central America will take such desperate measures to go to the closest place where they can find jobs and earn decent wages?

And they will keep coming until we do something to equalize our economies and productivity.