Worried about illegal immigrants?

Go after the employers who hire them! 

Not that anyone in a position of power in government has any intention of ever doing so -- it's so much easier to blame the people doing the work for lower than legal wages under unsafe working conditions than it is to address the real problem, the guys who sign the checks or hand out the cash.  Dry up the jobs and the word will get out back to Oaxaca that it's pointless to go north.  Do enough high profile sweeps of Tyson and Smithfield and all the other packing plants and work sites where the persons being frogmarched out to the vans are the plant managers and Human Resource department heads, hold a few high-profile trials, throw those suckers in suits into prison for a few years, and you better believe the document checking for new hires would suddenly get a whole lot better.

But, like so much that goes on in American politics, the short, simple solution is not the one that most people are willing to consider.  Instead there's the usual blame the most powerless person in the equation:  the poor sap of a mojado just trying to survive.

I'm listening to C-SPAN this morning.  First topic up is the anti-immigrant law the governor of Arizona just signed, the one that is obviously targeting anyone and everyone in the state unlucky enough not to be born lily-white and that requires that people carry around proof of their citizenship.  If a cop pulls you over and asks for that proof, it's now a misdeamnor to not have it on you. 

There's been the usual deep depths of Teh Stupid coming through the phone lines, the rants about illegals simultaneously sucking off the welfare teat and stealing jobs from hard-working Americans.  That one's always baffled me:  how can any group of people be both so lazy and unwilling to work that they're all on welfare and at the same time be out there taking jobs away from legal residents? 

Lots of stupid, too, on the subject of that requirement to having proof of citizenship or legal residency on you.  You know, the U.S. has never required national IDs or an internal passport the way some other countries do.  In fact, that's been one of those things that conservatives have always opposed.  There have been objections for years to federal plans to link drivers' licenses databases, for example, and one of the arguments has always been that the federal government was trying to use drivers' licenses requirements as way to impose a national ID system on the states.  Well, right-wingers, if you insist that all persons be able to prove that they are U.S. citizens, then what you are in essence doing is arguing for a national internal passport, a standardized ID that would be recognized everywhere by everyone.

The stupid, it burns.