Mike Ballard wrote:
>
> I think that we have to agree to disagree here. I think it's in the interests
> of potential undocumented proletarians to get documented to come to the U.S. to
> work
And without exception probably every single undocumented migrant to the u.s. has tried to get documented. Not asking is the same as asking if you know 50 people exactly like you who have been refused. In studies of unemployment they have the category of "discouraged workers." You are talking for the most part about a categoy of "discouraged migrants." They know (accurately) that there is no damn way they are going to get a visa. They know (accurately) that working in the u.s. is their best, perhaps only, way to escape a desperate situation. Do you really think that those millions of people flocking around the world (not just into the u.s.) wouldn't choose such a superior way if it were open to them. It isn't as though U.S. embassys had big neon signs saying Come One Come All Get Your Documentation here! I think your advice is simple cruelty.
And it is far beyond the capacity of the left in the u.s. at this time to change the policies of the u.s. on granting visas.
Almost everyone in this thread is forgetting the elementary fact of left politics in the u.s. today: The Left does not exist; there are only thousands of scattered individual leftists and group(lets) trying in their various ways to bring such a left into existence. (Some of them -- perhaps a majority of them -- don't even know this is what they are doing. That is something they have to learn. But that is another topic.) And anyone who thinks those leftists should go about it in another way should (a) shut up for a while, (b) go to work in his/her local situation to build a left nucleus in the way he/she sees fit, and (c) in so far as that method works start communicating it to others around the country.
I will name one way that definitely won't work: guilt-tripping other would-be leftists for not already having brought in utopia.
I would be interested in just how you plan to communicate your idea to people in various mexican villages how they should organize their lives.
Carrol
P.S. Perhaps an analogy. Someday someone talking to a person suffering from depression is going to say for the 999th time "You just need to get some sunshine; go out and have some fun; think happy thoughts." And that depressed person is going to pick up a baseball bat and beat that wellwisher's head until his brains spurt out like soda pop.