You Think Immigration's A Problem Now?

I was thinking yesterday that the true significance of the rise of OOgo & the Chavezistas is that as those countries' economies are dismantled, our borders will be flooded with Venezuelans, Bolivians and Nicaraguans in addition to the Mexicans, El Salvadorans, Dominicans and Ecuadorans already coming.

And the likely effect of abruptly raising the minimum wage $2 bucks is going to be encouraging companies to see if they can get away with illegal immigrant labor for a few more years.

VDH on the real solution , and it's something no one talks about.

ultimately the solution lies in the hope that a Tijuana might become as prosperous as a San Diego -- now a few miles away but a world apart.
After all, Hong Kong used to be a magnet for illegal immigrants who streamed in from impoverished Red China. Not so much any longer. Shanghai, for example, in two decades has become almost as wealthy as the old British colony.

East Berliners used to risk their lives to cross the wall into the West. Now billions of dollars are being invested in restoring the eastern half of a united Germany's capital.
Since World War II, poor workers from largely agrarian, Catholic and authoritarian Spain flocked northward into industrialized, Protestant and more democratic Germany and France to find work. Today, Spain's employment and growth rates compare favorably with those of its northern neighbors.

In each of these cases, once poorer regions bordering far wealthier societies have --either by emulation, absorption or coercion -- radically liberalized their economic ystems. With jobs and capital almost as plentiful at home as abroad, few wish to leave.

Ain't that sensible? He has some excellent suggestions for how me might help Mexico get a move on. I find his approach so much more appetizing than, say, Michelle Malkin's. Not to pick on her, she just happens to have a column in today's paper, but I am tired of the Right arguing that our immigration system is broken and therefore not one more Hispanic should be allowed in to the U.S.

Last November, congressional investigators reported the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) had lost track of 111,000 files in 14 of the agency's busiest district offices and processed as many as 30,000 citizenship applications last year without the required files. Poof. I have heard firsthand from adjudicators in Texas and Southern California who have piles of files in backrooms that have yet to be read. The application backlog remains in the millions. Republican Sens. Charles Grassley of Iowa and Susan Collins of Maine called for a Government Accountability Office review that uncovered at least one case in which an applicant with ties to the terrorist group Hezbollah was granted citizenship without a check of his primary file.

That's a very serious problem, but for heaven's sake --this is America, the land of ingenuity and can-do spirit. If the problem is a tremendous back-log, fix the dang back-log, don't throw your hands in the air. How about some solutions for that?