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I love Tom Tancredo. And George Bush.

I love Tom Tancredo.

Really. I do.

Because he has single-handedly been able to do what Democrats have been unable to do for the last 7 years: fracture the Republican base and make Democrats, by comparison, look like the party of sanity, reason, and unison.

That being said, Tancredo is crazy. And I mean you need to say the word "crazy" you need to say it with two distinct syllables intoning at a high C and then G. He may be well meaning.

Well meaning to racists and jingoists and nationalists. Anyone who actually believes it's feasible to completely shut down our almost 2000 mile border with Mexico and expel the 11 million + illegal immigrants back to their home country needs a visit from the reality fairy. Tancredo repeatedly says that there is a way for people to cross the border, and it is through the normal immigration, visa, and green card process. Tancredo has obviously never had to deal with this situation himself. Case in point: in 2001, I had a friend who married a girl from Scotland. She came here legally, got married legally, and she was from a friendly country. She wanted a green card so she could work. And every few weeks she had to go to Salt Lake, stand in line for 3-4 hours, fill out endless paperwork, only to be told to come back in a few weeks when it had all been processed. And when she did come back, she had to fill out the same forms again because she didn’t check one box correctly. And she was from ENGLAND. Her native language was ENGLISH. She went to college here. Imagine an uneducated, Spanish-speaking migrant farmer trying to do this.

First, let's address the border. We have built walls, built fences, hired more border patrol (tripling its size in the last 10 years), and illegal immigration is UP, not down. Also up is the mortality rate of those crossing the border, crime rates in border communities, human smuggling, and the length of stay of illegals in the US. That's right: with tighter border security, once here, people will stay longer instead of just going home after the (fill-in-the-blank agricultural product) season is over. The truth is, unless we want to spend the billions of dollars it would cost annually to build and then maintain a Berlin-wall-type border, people will still come here. Why?

Opportunity. The free market. The American Dream. Things Republicans always talk about but don't really believe in. The truth is, we're addicted to cheap labor. Go to Wal-mart: all of the effects of cheap labor are there. Cheap Chinese factory labor to make your home electronics. Cheap child labor from Saipan to make your sports shoes and clothes. And cheap migrant labor from Latin America to pick your lettuce and strawberries and also to package your meat. If you ate dinner tonight, I guarantee at least one thing you ate was partially prepared for you by an illegal, undocumented immigrant.

Plus, have you ever been to Mexico? And not some resort in Cabo or Cancun: real Mexico. It's horrible there. If you lived in poverty and the cries of your hungry children or younger brothers and sisters kept you up at night, what would you do, what would you risk to get to America and make in an hour ($2-$3) what most people in your village could only hope to make in a week, or a month? Almost anything.

But what if your career as a dirt farmer doesn't give you the wages to be able to hire a lawyer to help you get the necessary paperwork to come here legally? What if you know that if you even did come here legally you would continually have to deal with expensive paperwork and tons of red tape? What if you knew that an illegal journey across the border would be hard and dangerous, but that you were about 60-70% likely you would get through?

And so what do we have: 1) a workforce that wants to work no matter for how little, 2) a country full of industries that want cheap labor, (oh, Marx seemed to hit the nail on the head in Das Kapital) and 3) an immigration system that rewards illegal behavior and is cumbersome and costly to those who wish to pursue legal residency. With a system like this, of course we have a problem with illegal immigration!

There are serious negative effects of illegal immigration. Sure there's crime, but not actually as much as one would think. A great deal of the crime has to do with the drug trade, which, again, has more to do with our demand for the product than the Mexican cartels' supply. Crime rates among illegals are exactly as high as you would expect if you factor in poverty. We can therefore assume that the crime is due to poverty, not race or legal/illegal status. In fact, legal immigrants with the same rates of poverty have nearly the same crime rates. The argument also goes that if these people are willing to break the law to come to our country, they are more likely to break other laws once they’re here. That is just flat out an ad hominem attack that has no basis in reality. How bad of a crime is it to steal a loaf of bread in order to feed one’s family. So, is it also as much of a crime to sneak across a border to work for money to buy that loaf of bread? Isn’t it a bigger crime to lie to stockholders and fudge accounting numbers, meanwhile quietly selling your corporate stock options and then leaving the corporation bankrupt and its stockholders with valueless stock? And yet we’re all in a tizzy about one and not the other.

So, yes, there's a crime problem. We house thousands or even tens of thousands of citizens' of other countries in our prisons. We have the problem of absorbing a large population of people who are, to a great degree, impoverished. But these same arguments were made against the Germans, the Irish, the Italians, every kind of Eastern Europeans, and every other immigrant group in the last 150 years. What ever happened to the sonnet inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty: "Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, / I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" I guess since this wave of immigration is through San Diego, Laredo, and El Paso instead of Ellis Island, that promise is now null and void.

And then there's the supposed endless line of "these people" sucking off the teat of our welfare system. It is true that uninsured illegal aliens impose huge costs on our health care system, which is then passed on to the rest of us, forcing more and more people out of health insurance. I'm not going to try to gloss over this or say it isn't important. In fact, it’s these same uninsured that crowd our emergency rooms because that's the only health care they can get. The problem, again, is not with immigrants, legal or illegal, it's with the bass-ackwards way we provide medical care for the uninsured. Wait until a problem is so bad you have to go to the emergency room and receive $3000 of medical care and tests instead of having a 5-minute doctor visit and $10 of antibiotics 3 weeks earlier.

And then the illegals "dump" their kids in our public school. My question is, what else do you want them to do? We can spend more money on schools to give these kids a decent education so they don't live in poverty the rest of their lives (and grow up to be uninsured and commit even more crime), or we can teach them. Teach them English, teach them how lucky they are to be American, so they grow up to be our policemen, our Congressmen, our architects, our businessmen, etc, etc. In fact, entrepreneurship among illegal immigrants and their children is above the national average. There’s a Republican value for you!

Furthermore, if we have a problem with an influx of kids into our schools, we should look at how it is we pay for them. In most areas across the US, the primary source of funding for schools is property taxes. Illegals might be able to pay these taxes, if given the opportunities for home ownership in our country. But, if they are renting their homes, they are, indirectly, paying for their “fair share” of property tax, through their rent.

What I especially love about the House Bill is that it would take children born to illegal immigrants, so-called “anchor children,” and make them wards of the state, rather than deporting underage US citizens to their country of origin. Now, thinking about this logically, if one of the biggest arguments against illegal immigration is the costs associated with it, wouldn’t this be exacerbating the problem? Now, instead of just paying for their education and health care, we have to pay for their food, their clothing, their shelter, and all other costs. Time to bring back crowded orphanages!!! And with this kids being raised without parents, we can expect the breakdown of the nuclear family to bring with it the increase in crime and anti-social behavior any sociologist will tell you is commensurate with children being raised without any parental influence. You want your “war on the family”: here you go. But I guess it doesn’t matter as long as they’re brown, Catholic families and not white Protestants.

Plus, there's the worry that somehow terrorists are crossing our unprotected border. The sad thing is, they don't have to come from Mexico. They can come very easily from Canada, and also very easily by just coming ashore on boats in remote areas of coastline anywhere along our coasts. People from the Dept of Homeland Security and Border Patrol say they have never apprehended a suspected terrorist on the Mexican border. They've gotten several coming from Canada, none from Mexico. Their estimates are that they apprehend 1/3 of all those illegally crossing the southern border. To assume that "We're just not catching the terrorists" belies the truth of the numbers.

So that's the problem: what is the solution?

Definitely not the bill passed by the House a few months ago, although it does have some good ideas: making it a felony to be here illegally is not one of the good ideas. Neither is the tearing apart of families. So, now is the FBI is going to be involved in the mass roundup of illegal immigrants and deporting them back to where they came from? Sure, not like they have anything else important to do besides rounding up a bunch of lettuce pickers and gardeners. Oh, and let's make it a felony to in any way aid or comfort an illegal alien. How many churches and private charities are we trying to destroy? There's your real war on religion right there-- preventing Christian churches from obeying the second greatest commandment: love thy neighbor as thyself.

That being said, I do tend to look at immigration through the lens of religion, and while I don't propone mixing church and state, many of the greatest movements in the history of our country (abolition, progressivism, civil rights) were motivated by religion. Now, my religious beliefs tell me that all people are inherently equal, and all equally loved and cared for by our Divine Creator. If we are then equal, shouldn't we give all people the same equal opportunity to come to this country? I'm not talking about a completely open border, but a simple yet thorough screening process that doesn't discriminate against someone who is poor (judging them not on the color of their skin or the size of their pocketbook, but on the content of their character).

Because I believe in inherent human equality, it pains me that we take advantage of the desperate circumstances of some, forcing them to work long hours for less pay, in order to make our lifestyles better. I understand how much I benefit from it (like I want to pay $7 for a head of lettuce), but it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. And to further degrade our brothers and sisters by taking their hard work for granted and then tell them how worthless they are and how much we hate them and they are what's wrong with our country because they're an easy and visible scapegoat just sickens me.

What else sickens me is this news tidbit that I just found from Ontario, CA:

Eighth grader Anthony Soltero shot himself on Thursday, March 30, after the assistant principal at De Anza Middle School told him that he was going to prison for three years because of his involvement as an organizer of the March 28 school walk-outs to protest the anti-immigrant legislation in Washington. The vice principal also forbade Anthony from attending graduation activities and threatened to fine his mother for Anthony's truancy and participation in the student protests.

First of all, what a dick of a vice principal. I normally don't rip on teachers or educational administrators, but god damn! What could possibly be more American than the right to protest? Maybe if they'd thrown some tea into the harbor it would make it better for all you haters out there. This boy should have been celebrated, not denigrated. Yes, he walked out of school. Maybe that's not optimal, but better than the average Anglo kid who sat in class, then went home and played XBox for four hours and never thought for one minute about their place in the world and how they could help their fellow man.

My new favorite news story is this: Bush: Democrats' leader sunk immigration bill

Go read it. Then have a good laugh. I find that's all Bush is good for these days: laughs. Laughing to cover up crying because. . . .man, what a waste of a presidency. Herbert Hoover could give Bush some tips. (name a dam after yourself) So could Nixon. (when you resign, make it memorable) So could Lyndon Johnson. (don't prosecute wars in foreign countries where you can get caught in the middle of a civil war and where global policy is murky. . .oh, wait) So could Grant. (drink more) So could Warren G Harding (make sure you die before anyone finds out all the illegal stuff you did).

Anyway, it's laughable that Democrats sunk the immigration bill. Actually, what really happened was that there was a procedural "test vote" to be able to vote on the actual immigration bill (the Senate version of which I am actually somewhat ok with) and it only got 27 votes. Out of 100. Remember they need 51 to pass. There are 55 Republicans and 44 Democrats and 1 "Independent) (we love you Jim Jeffords!) Uh, maybe it's just "Washington Fuzzy Math," but it sounds like Democrats couldn't block jack squat if they wanted to. They couldn't block Alito. And Ted Kennedy even co-sponsored one of the pieces of legislation, so. . . . I'm thinking it's the Republicans fault if they can't get legislation passed. And if you really mean that Harry Reid is able to keep all of the Democrats united on this one. . . .wow, congratulations. Someone was able to finally do something to unify the Democrats. (I'm looking at you, Tancredo, with an assist from "El Presidente" Bush).

Bush is just mad because no one is doing his guest worker program. Wow, I wonder if that's because it's a dumb idea. It was dumb when France did it. And it's still dumb. The only proof you need: well, first, it's French. Second: look at France. Not like they haven't had any sort of violence (cue burning Le Cars. . . now!) or the need to impose curfews because guest workers were rioting on the street because they were being exploited and had no access to civil or political rights in the country. They called them "disaffected Muslim youth," but what were they doing in France? Guest workers. You know, when Bush is right, he's right. Don't listen to France on issues like Iraq, where they actually have some expertise from doing business with Saddam and the other Shia and Kurdish factions for the last 35 years, but copy their policy exactly when it's a complete and total screw-up. Now that's as American as Crepes Suzette. Magnifique! Plus, it seemed to make one group of Americans VERY happy, and it's someone we don't need to cater to any more than we already do: big business. Sure, no American is going to take a job as a hotel maid that pays $2 an hour, but a guest worker would. Same with a meat-packing plant. A suburban WASP can't find a gardener who will do his yard for $10 a week or a nanny who will work for $50 a week, so get a guest worker. So, should we really institutionalize and normalize this second-class citizenship of these peoples, or should we do something else? While we're at it, let's make sure we can rent day laborers right inside the Home Depot instead of having to go outside to get them. So, President Bush, while we're getting the kinks worked out of the whole guest worker thing, let's make sure the bidet is working perfectly in the Oval Office bathroom.

Note: I don't hate the French. I actually love them a ton. French bread, French cuisine, art, language, culture-- wonderful. It's the French arrogance and ethnocentrism that we can do without here in the US. Plus, it's just funny to make fun of the French, even if you don't hate them (like Monty Python and the Holy Grail).

So, we have a dependence on illegal immigrants but there are problems associated with the practice. In general, it’s probably a bad idea to reward illegal behavior, (although we do it all the time to our corporations) so just a Reagan-style amnesty is out of the question. However, the McCain-Kennedy bill seems like a decent compromise—punish past illegal behavior by paying a fine, but with an eventual path to citizenship. This way, illegal immigrants can come out of the dark and be treated like actual human beings (what a concept!). Let’s hope some sanity can come into the Senate, although it took McCain over 7 years to get the McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill passed. We’ll see how he fares on this one.

The truth is, we need immigration. Do we want to be able to pay for the social safety net of the baby boomers? We’re told that the basic problem is too few workers to support Medicare and Social Security. The best solution? More workers. Especially low-wage workers, as the Social Security tax is one of the most regressive taxes we have in our country. (Now, I don’t like that, but it’s the truth nonetheless)

Our final question is, “What does it mean to be American?” Is it language? A shared culture? An ethnicity? I propose that being American is not who you are but rather what you believe. It is our ideals, not our DNA, that define America. And if there are people out there that share these ideas: family, equality of opportunity, self-determination, the pursuit of happiness. Most Americans I know complain about the futility and banality of voting and politics. They get all the rewards of our society but would never show up for a protest, write a letter to the editor (much less their Congressman), or be involved in shaping the future of our country. They take all of the rights guaranteed by our Constitution for granted. And then I see people marching in the streets, peacefully, because they just want to be like us. They want these rights, they want our success. And the true American dream is that we can all race to the top together, and just because someone else succeeds means that I must fail. We don’t have to push people down to elevate ourselves. Our friends and neighbors marching in the streets understand this. These are people I welcome into my country, no matter from what land, what language you speak, how poor or rich you are—you are my brothers and sisters, and we all need to find a way to make some room at the table for the rest of our (growing) American family.

The origins of American Yabloko

I was racking my brain for something. Just something that encapsulated who I am, where I've been, what I believe. . . . something funny, but not childish; something unique, but not too pretentious; something. . . .me.

And then I found it: searching through wikipedia (the best website in the world maybe), I remembered Russia. I often think about Russia: I spent two years (1997-1999) there, and it affected me greatly. Here was a land of promise, with an amazing choice before her.

While I was there, one of the major political parties was known as Yabloko, or more correctly "The Russian Democratic Party Yabloko" (or Российская демократическая партия "Яблоко" for you slavophiles out there). Yabloko has since fallen on hard times, failing to meet the 5% threshold necessary to get representation in Parliament. But the idea of "As American as Apple Pie" is fun to me, so I thought having something about Yabloko would be perfect me. It's everyday, simple, and slightly political.

As I sit and watch one country that I deeply love fall, I worry more about what I can be doing for my country, which I love even more deeply (I wouldn't dream of Russian politics- I think our country needs enough help before we go tell others how to run theirs). Hence, the American Yabloko. Here I will talk about my views of what is going on, at both international, federal, and state and local levels, and why it matters. Yabloko are like the Populists of Russia. Populists are what we need more of in the US. And Progressives. And Libertarians. And Contitutionalists. And Greens. And, in lesser quantities, Republicans and Democrats. So, if you want to be slow and monolithic like an elephant or braying and obstinate like a jackass, go for it. But try to keep the feces off the carpet, because I know y'all ain't housebroken and I know how you like to throw your waste at one another. (maybe we can get your corporate zookeepers to pay for a maid service or something in exchange for a tax loophole). Free minds are welcome. Strong opinions are very much welcome, no matter what side of an issue you're on. Bigotry, prejudice, and ignorance are not.

When all is said and done, I want this to be serious. But serious fun. Hence the title "As American as Yabloko Pirogi." Pirogi are Russian pies. This is a play on words, (one which I stole the idea of from either The Simpsons or Conan O'Brien) and hopefully you get the joke. If not, nod politely and we'll see you again soon.

By the way, my previous blog at myspace.com will continue to be up and updated for now, but used more for frivolity and obnoxiousness. For some of that, go check it out. Oh, and swearing. And hardcore nudity.