One issue that is very dear to my heart is the plight of the hardworking people who fight against all odds and barriers to come to America to do the jobs most of us can’t or won’t do. Back in my hometown of Nampa, I grew up on “the North side”, which was home to a large Mexican migrant farmworker population. I attended bilingual schools and was the token white kid in a large Chicano/Mexican-American population.

My best friend in grade school was a kid named Ricky Gutierrez (RIP) who was the reason for one of the few fistfights I ever engaged in. The fifth grade bully (who had flunked twice and was shaving at this point) was picking on Ricky, calling him a “stupid spic” and “wetback greaser”. For some reason, all fear of this much larger asshole left my body (remember, I was a grade ahead in school, so I was essentially a fourth grader challenging a seventh-grade-age kid) and I called him out.

“Brian, leave him alone. Why don’t you go back to the dog pound where you belong?” I said. My put-downs weren’t nearly as advanced back then.

“Why don’t you say that to my face!” he replied.

I walked right up to him and put my face four inches from his. “I said, ‘why don’t you go back to the dog pound where you belong?'”

He hit me. I tried to hit him. We flailed and hit and kicked… and he was whuppin’ my cracker ass! The teacher separated us and I gave the good ol’ macho “lemme go, I’ll kick his ass” routine while secretly thinking “thank you, thank you, thank you from stopping him from whuppin’ my cracker ass!”

Anyway, when I hear people get all up in arms about illegal immigration, it touches a nerve. Like this latest post from Adam:

In Brownsville, Texas, we’ve got this story:

The Brownsville Herald reported U.S. Magistrate Judge Felix Recio is getting tough with illegals caught crossing the Rio Grande, telling a group of Honduran immigrants last week to warn their buddies back home.

“I want you to tell all your friends in Honduras that if they come through Brownsville, Texas, they will not be paroled into the system, and they will be put in jail and deported,” Recio told 18-year-old Jorge Enrique Vasquez Carrasco in open court as he handed him a jail sentence that could keep him locked up until space opens at an immigration facility and he is deported.

Under the typical scenario, illegals are issued a notice to appear, at which time they go on their way and begin their new life in the U.S. Federal statistics indicate 88 percent of aliens issued a notice don’t show up for their hearings. Border agents near McAllen, Texas, have nicknamed the summons “notice to disappear” because they are so often disregarded.

Way to go, Judge Recio. This is plain old common sense. I’d suggest nominating him to a federal judgeship, but liberal would be sure to suggest such common sense was “an extraordinary circumstance”.

So, naturally, I had to retort:

I really do hope we succeed at keeping every single brown-skinned illegal alien out of the United States. On that glorious day, I plan to make a special trip out to the onion fields of Nampa to watch white folks stooped over for fourteen hours a day in the blazing sun working for sub-poverty wages.

I’ve actually worked the fields alongside illegals. For about two weeks, before my fourteen-year-old sunburned candy-ass realized that these hands were better suited to typing. Those people are the hardest-working people on the planet.

We could stop illegal immigration if we really wanted to, but as you’ve suggested (I think it was you), business wants the flow to continue. Capitalist America was built on the backs of slave labor and its not too eager to give up any cheap source of manpower. Whether it’s shipping tech jobs to Bangalore or bringing in Mexicans to bus tables, our consumer society cannot exist without wage slaves.

The true solution would be to live up to the inscription on the Statue of Liberty: give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. We need to set up a regulated system for the inevitable and unstoppable migratory workforce that seeks its betterment in the American Dream. Of course, no GOP politician is going to stand for that; poor brown people have an annoying tendency to vote Democratic.

And don’t kid yourself that it isn’t racism, pure and simple, at the base of anti-illegal-alien sentiment. If your Joe Redneck saw only white faces speaking English at the construction site or the strawberry field or the fast-food take-out window, you wouldn’t hear one-tenth of the complaints.