Andrew Leonard: Are you a total moron or do you just play one on the internet? How could you watch Lou Dobbs and not know the answer to your question? Lou Dobbs is not a Republican. He's an "independant populist". Furthermore, he does not just want to secure the border. He also wants employers to be prosecuted for the crime of hiring and exploiting illegal workers. Removing the incentive for businesses to hire illegal immigrants is the only way to solve this problem. Giving illegals amnesty, legal status, a path to citizenship, whatever you want to call it, is fundamentally unfair and unjust to the people waiting to come to the U.S. legally as well as to legal workers. Also, granting amnesty will only make the problem worse by providing incentive for more illegals to come here. This is about more than the Hispanic vote. It's about doing what is right. Granting amnesty was wrong in 1986 and it would be even more wrong today.

If any one can hope for anything, it's the tipping point that will come with economic factors--the hypocrisy of the Republican support of both Big Business AND extreme immigration control measures will reach a point where the demand for low-wage workers of any type far outruns the supply. At this point, all the Republican big business/anti-immigration cronies might actually have to admit, "Yes, we built our empires on the backs of as many low-wage, undocumented workers that we thought we could get away with without being caught."

As far as securing our borders goes--it really is unfortunate that we seem to have a rising contingent of xenophobes in our current political parties. More fences? More walls? More jails? More guards? More guns?

Frankly, I'm appalled and disgusted. The last time people were this adamant about keeping people out, they built the Berlin Wall.

Lou Dobbs is not a Republican. He's an "independant populist".

Yes, he even said as much in his paranoic meltdown rant "commentary" last night.

"DOBBS: A couple of weeks before the Senate prepared to take up the Bush-Kennedy-McCain immigration legislation, I told a number of my colleagues here that because of my opposition to illegal immigration and demand for border and port security, that I would likely be attacked by the liberal media as vigorously as never before. And now the liberal media is outdoing itself again. Writing in the 'Washington Post,' Gene Weingarten, who obviously fancies himself a witty and worldly fellow, dismisses just about anyone outraged by unchecked outsourcing of American jobs and runaway illegal immigration as quote 'xenophobically inclined.'

He implies further that if you're concerned about either issue, illegal immigration or outsourcing of American jobs, you must be right wing. Weingarten doesn't even know or he chooses to ignore the fact that I'm an independent populist with little regard for either political party or the left and right."

Rest of defensive, paranoid rambling:

http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0706/18/ldt.01.html

If the people in favour of immigration reform don't get this guy to shut up and get someone sane to step in as the visible mouthpiece for their movement, it's quickly going to be easy for anti-reform types to frame anyone pro-reform as xenophobic, racist nutjobs.

Wouldn't the labor market rapidly saturate? Wages would bottom out and then tend to slowly float up again. What if we pulled an Ellis Island and just made all comers citizens (more or less) on the spot? Give them a SS card and they start to pay taxes and use public services from day one? Then what would happen? I think Lou Dobbs would make a lot of noise and so would the White American nativists and then we'd discover a functioning America where the Libertarians are happy that wages flow like water level and social progressives are happy because everyone is 'legal'. Businesses are happy because wages fluctuate more or less naturally. And so on. People should study the history of the volumes of immigration. They they would understand that numbers peaked naturally and on their own, before the Government stepped in to limit immigration in the 1910-1920 period in response to racists and isolationists. After 1910 there simply were not that many more new opportunities for millions of immigrants to take advantage of (And certainly WW1 put a crimp in immigration, none the less, the numbers track to economic opportunity). Perhaps the solution to the immigration problem is to eliminate the distinction.

As far as policy goes, there is no way to reconcile the protectionist and business wings of the Republican party. So what they will try and figure out is how to create a symbolic gesture that undermines Lou Dobbs position without really changing the game.

Look for a huge wall that doesn't really stop anyone. Or high-profile busts of a few hundred workers. Or something much better that only an evil genius like Rove can come up with. Something that sends the right coded message without really having any practical impact. Maybe arresting and deporting Angelia Jolie's nanny, that sort of thing.

Calling people names tends not to make your own points any stronger. Just a friendly FYI!

Give them a SS card and they start to pay taxes and use public services from day one?

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Illegal immigrants already get SS cards. There's an entire program dedicated to the issuance of such cards. Not only that, but SS information is not sharable with law enforcement.

This way SS gets money but doesn't have to pay it out. The same thing happens with guest workers.

It's a bit unfair to blame business when 1) The United States issues SS cards to people who shouldn't be allowed to work. 2) Places the burden of law enforcement upon businesses.

Let's use an an example my gardener and the people who recently built my garage. The are all of hispanic descent. Some speak English fluently, some do not. Am I to question their status because of the color of their skin?

No, I'm not going to assume somone is illegal.

The last time people were this adamant about keeping people out, they built the Berlin Wall.

The Berlin Wall (and the nasty fortification on the then-border between E. and W. Germany) was built to keep E. Germans IN.

Building walls to keep people OUT (Great Wall of China, Maginot Line, Atlantic Wall) has a much spottier record of success.