You’re finally seeing the light here….I hope.

“cheap imported labor tends to lower industrial innovation (see the prebellum South for instance), and it also encourages Mexico to continue its dysfunctional politics since they have a nice release valve for their discontented citizens.”

Not only that, it ensures public assistance program outlays will swell to accommodate the growth of impoverished workers….at the very same time as retirement entitlements will swell spending on seniors. So both the workers and the retirees will be draining a higher percentage of public coffers at the same time. There’s no way that’s gonna come together effectively.

“If Bush were smart, he’d put a guest-worker program right alongside tough border protection”

Here’s where you cling to your “business whore” roots. There’s nothing the business community would love more than a permanent disenfranchised labor force in the nation’s most vulnerable industries. Taxation without representation=quasi-slavery. And how in the hell would you propose we convince these “guest workers” to leave after their guest status ends and business wants to replace him with another disempowered warm body? Of all proposals on the table regarding immigration, none are more noxious that the “guest worker” canard.

I’m all for securing borders. If we have to build a big ugly wall on the border, so be it. I support legal immigration and would even favor expanding quotas if we targeted the influx to professional or semi-professional fields (such as nursing) where the demand for labor can be met without saturating labor supply. A continued influx of legal low-skill/semi-skill workers is fine as long as its done at a controlled level. New blood in the labor market is good for a growing economy and to serve as a competitive motivator for the domestic workforce, but the current approach of deliberate saturation of the low-skill/semi-skill labor market to suppress wages is unacceptable.