This was being discussed on the radio last night. I thought it was interesting because of the current Immigration law being proposed in the U.S. The U.S. will be more forgiving towards immigrants then the Mexican Government is towards Americans and other foreign nationals who wish to make Mexico their home.
Mexico has a radical idea for a rational immigration policy that most Americans would love. However, Mexican officials haven't been sharing that idea with us as they press for our Congress to adopt the McCain-Kennedy immigration reform bill.
That's too bad, because Mexico, which annually deports more illegal aliens than the United States does, has much to teach us about how it handles the immigration issue. Under Mexican law, it is a felony to be an illegal alien in Mexico.
At a time when the Supreme Court and many politicians seek to bring American law in line with foreign legal norms, it's noteworthy that nobody has argued that the U.S. look at how Mexico deals with immigration and what it might teach us about how best to solve our illegal immigration problem. Mexico has a single, streamlined law that ensures that foreign visitors and immigrants are:
in the country legally;
have the means to sustain themselves economically;
not destined to be burdens on society;
of economic and social benefit to society;
of good character and have no criminal records; and
contributors to the general well-being of the nation.
The law also ensures that:
immigration authorities have a record of each foreign visitor;
foreign visitors do not violate their visa status;
foreign visitors are banned from interfering in the country's internal politics;
foreign visitors who enter under false pretenses are imprisoned or deported;
foreign visitors violating the terms of their entry are imprisoned or deported;
those who aid in illegal immigration will be sent to prison.
More info at link. Interestingly enough, this story is from Canada.
Article 33 - Foreigners are those who do not possess the qualities determined in Article 30. They have the right to the guarantees of Chapter I of the first title of this Constitution, but the Executive of the Union has the exclusive right to expel from the national territory, immediately and without necessity of judicial proceedings, all foreigners whose stay it judges inconvenient. Foreigners may not, in any manner, involve themselves in the political affairs of the country.
One set of standards for me, a different set of standards for thee.
#2
P2K, You don't understand. What the Mexicans want is to impose Mexican law on CA, NM, AZ and TX by making them part of Mexico. That way they will recover the lands the US "stole".
#3
Hmmmm...looks like they maybe need an Immigration Reform Bill. Maybe Ted Kennedy can head on down there and help them formulate one. Use that good tequilia as an incentive.
#4
Rambler I can tell you that many of the Pueblo Indians along the Rio Grande never recognized the claim by either Madrid or Mexico City. They often shout out about their treatment under the hand of both and make an issue over any 'celebration' of the coming of the Spanish. The Apache never were brought under control for over two hundred years. It took us about forty to make it happen. If it was "stolen" land, it was stolen from the aboriginals and the tribes in New Mexico are more than happy to point that out.
Is it possible to win a war on the ground, and lose it in Congress?
Perhaps. In his Senate-floor speech Monday, Senator Richard Lugar announced, In my judgment, our course in Iraq has lost contact with our vital national security interests in the Middle East and beyond The prospects that the current surge strategy will succeed in the way originally envisioned by the president are very limited within the short period framed by our own domestic-policy debate.
The Indiana Republican endorses a downsizing and redeployment of the U.S. military mission in Iraq as an essential precondition to reasserting these vital national-security interests, which he defines thus:
1) To prevent any piece of Iraq from being a terrorist safe haven;
2) To prevent Iraqi sectarian violence from spilling over into any other parts of the region;
3) To prevent Iranian domination of the region; and
4) To prevent a loss of U.S. credibility in the region.
All four of these goals are being advanced, some of them dramatically, by the surge strategy of Gen. David Petraeus the very strategy that Sen. Lugar would scrap in favor of downsizing and redeployment.
The principal accomplishment of the surge to date is solidifying the Anbar Awakening, the significance of which has been under-reported by the media and ill-understood by the public. If any piece of territory in Iraq qualified as a terrorist safe haven, it was bloody Anbar. This province of little over 1 million people 4.5 percent of Iraqs population has accounted for 34.6 percent of U.S. casualties. (Insurgent activity in Baghdad, with five times the population, has accounted for fewer troop deaths both as a percent (29.5 percent) and in absolute numbers (1,052).
The virtual extinction of the insurgency in the province a victory that I was privileged to witness first-hand represented not some momentary quirk of tribal alliances, but a diligent application of the revised tactics that coalition forces have implemented under skilled, battle-proven officers and Gen. Petraeus. These tactics include meticulous census-taking of persons and vehicles; skilled, persistent diplomacy with tribal leaders; incorporation of local intelligence; constant foot patrols in the residential areas from platoon and squad sized outposts; and persistent perimeter control of areas cleared and held.
Even Lugar acknowledges the effectiveness of these tactics. He stated, I do not doubt the assessments of military commanders that there has been some progress in security We should attempt to preserve initiatives that have shown promise, such as engaging Sunni groups that are disaffected with the extreme tactics and agenda of al Qaeda in Iraq.
But it is hard to see how redeployment to Kuwait, or the Kurdish provinces, or hunkering down in large bases in the outlying desert will preserve this progress, let alone extend it. . . .
Lugar bases his plea for downsizing and redeployment on three premises: the state of the Iraqi government, the stress of the war on our military, and the constraints of our domestic political timetable.
The first two are canards. Dysfunction within the Iraqi government should take a back seat to the U.S. interest in stabilizing the regime. Yes, there are factions in the Iraqi parliament that want Iranian domination; yes, there are factions that will plunder the Iraqi treasury. But there are also factions that want stabilization and that look to us for protection and arbitration. We are ill-served when we let the former frame our public debate.
Much was made in the American press, for instance, of the anti-fence law introduced by the Sadrists during the early phases of the surge. Lugar cites it. He is blissfully unaware that Baghdad residents build their own security walls in response to neighborhood violence. They do it because it works, rendering checkpoints effective in blocking terrorist infiltration. We do it too only better.
The Sadrists, whose militias would cleanse certain Baghdad neighborhoods of Sunnis, scored a major PR victory with American civil libertarians through a legislative act that most Baghdadis regarded as absurd.
Lugar also advances a truism, that the engagement in Iraq stresses our military personnel. War opponents often raise this issue, so easily graphed in Power Point presentations. But I saw what no Power Point can demonstrate: The quality of combat power we bring to bear has improved from 2005 (my previous stint as an embed) to 2007. I was stunned by the number of infantrymen who are reenlisting, maintaining a core of corporate knowledge on how to fight this war. The young men coming into the infantry today know what they are getting into, and are eminently capable of meeting the challenge.
This leaves Lugars third, and most potent objection to a continuation of the surge: Some will argue, he told the Senate, that political timelines should always be subordinated to military necessity, but that is unrealistic in a democracy.
Lugar is saying, Because we lack the will to win, let us make a decision not to win, and thus reassert our will. This is particularly untimely now, when our military has accomplished one of the most stunning successes of this prolonged struggle. . . .
Posted by: Mike ||
06/28/2007 14:06 ||
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Link ||
[11130 views]
Top|| File under: Iraqi Insurgency
#1
Is it possible to win a war on the ground, and lose it in Congress?
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
06/28/2007 19:33 Comments ||
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#3
I know Dick Lugar -- family friend. Very nice guy. But I never understood how he had such a reputation as this foreign affairs guru. There's nothing exceptional there intelligence-wise. He's just a nice mid-western boy with lot's of nice liberal friends who's been in Washington a very long time.
Posted by: Captain Lewis ||
06/28/2007 20:15 Comments ||
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#4
The honourable senator admitted on NPR that he deliberately scheduled his speech to be the last one of the night, at 8:30 p.m., to an empty chamber. This got him in the Congressional Record, but otherwise can't possibly have made any difference. Ass!
Testimony delivered by Frederick W. Kagan, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs on Wednesday, June 27, 2007.
#3
...a flawed approach to the war in Iraq from 2003 to 2007...keeping the American troop presence in Iraq as small as possible, pushing unprepared Iraqi Security Forces into the lead too rapidly, and using political progress as the principal means of bringing the violence under control. In other words, it is an approach similar to the one proposed by the ISG and by some who are now pushing for political benchmarks and the rapid drawdown of American forces as the keys to success in the war.
That last sentence took the words right out of my mouth!
Posted by: Bobby ||
06/28/2007 12:53 Comments ||
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From Theo Spark via Home School Blogger
Iranian president Mahmud Ahmadinejad calls President Bush and tells him, "George, I had a wonderful dream last night. I could see America, the whole beautiful country, and on each house I saw a banner." ... The rest is at the link
Posted by: Chuck ||
06/28/2007 04:14 ||
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Link ||
[11128 views]
Top|| File under: Govt of Iran
#5
Hanson is right. It's not dollar inflation. Otherwise all goods would be experiencing inflation and they are not. Since Sept 11, 2001 oil prices have tripled (with corresponding increases in nat gas used to make fertilizer). A factory I have in interest in used to use nat gas for process heat because it was so much cheaper. But a few years ago we switched because coal generated electricity is cheaper than burning nat gas (a completely screwy idea if you think about the capital required to generate electricity).
In addition, as Hanson wrote, there have been huge increases in corn acreage to meet demand for ethanol. That mean less acreage for other crops.
In the final analysis, this production increase is good for the US and other agricultural economies. It increases report earnings and marginally reduces money sent to those who would destroy us. Now if our leadership only had the sense to crank up nuclear and coal-liquids production until we are self sufficient.
Posted by: ed ||
06/28/2007 12:33 Comments ||
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#6
report earnings = export earnings
Posted by: ed ||
06/28/2007 12:34 Comments ||
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#7
I buy it. Though a combination of letting too many people in the country coupled w/our insane calorie consumption also doesn't help.
#8
I have been wondering when the economic phenomenon of excess inflation was going to move from the financial press to the political press. Perhaps this is the first step of this issue getting onto the radar screen.
Ed, you are correct that all goods are not experiencing inflation, but the goods that are NOT are limited to those in which there is massive overcapacity (e.g. housing) or in which the main input to which is labor or manufacturing (e.g. any manufactured goods imported to the U.S.).
Up until recently, Greenspan was successful in containing inflation to financial-backed assets like stocks, bonds and homes (since a majority of the housing market is financed by debt). He left (IMO) when he saw that inflation was seeping into primary goods like food, fuel and basic materials.
The CPI is a very unreliable indicator of the general level of inflation for several reasons. The most obvious of which is that the widely advertised measure excludes food and fuel. One of the lesser reasons is due to the changes in calculation enacted by the Boskin commission, in which hedonic pricing was adopted in calculating the major cost indices. Essentially, hedonic pricing deflates the prices that we actually pay for a good by the perceived higher quality of the good compared to the past, thus understating the rate of change in prices.
Couple the above with the fact that the Fed stopped publishing M3 last year, and the stage is set for massive hyperinflation the likes of which we have never seen in our lifetime.
My motto in preparing for the impending recession is deflation in things we want/inflation in things we need.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
