Mark Steyn for President

The brilliantly articulate Mark Steyn, in his most recent column waxes eloquent about the rights and wrongs in this entire illegal immigration fiasco.

I know, I know...everything I recommend is a must read, but look at it this way; I'm never going to steer you wrong and have you waste your precious time on something trivial or inane.

Steyn is amazingly intuitive and prolific. If I were to have a Solomonic wish, I think it would be for his intellect, insight and ability to articulate his lucidity.

See for yourself:

"Mexico warned Tuesday it would file lawsuits in U.S. courts if National Guard troops detain migrants on the border."

On what basis? Posse Comitatus? It's unconstitutional to use the U.S. military against foreign nationals before they've had a chance to break into the country and become fine upstanding members of the Undocumented-American community?

Or is Mexico taking legal action on the broader grounds that in America it's now illegal to enforce the law? Which, given that Senate bill, is a not unreasonable supposition.

Whatever. Under the new "comprehensive immigration reform" bill (Posse Como Estas?), a posse of National Guardsmen will be stationed in the Arizona desert but only as Wal-Mart greeters to escort members of the Illegal-American community to the nearest Social Security office to register for benefits backdated to 1973.

Meanwhile, Sen. John McCain, in a quintessentially McCainiac contribution to the debate, angrily denied that the Senate legislation was an "amnesty." "Call it a banana if you want to," he told his fellow world's greatest deliberators. "To call the process that we require under this legislation amnesty frankly distorts the debate and it's an unfair interpretation of it."

He has a point. Technically, an "amnesty" only involves pardoning a person for a crime rather than, as this moderate compromise legislation does, pardoning him for a crime and also giving him a cash bonus for committing it. In fact, having skimmed my Webster's, I can't seem to find a word that does cover what the Senate is proposing, it having never previously occurred to any other society in the course of human history. Whether or not, as McCain says, we should call it a singular banana, it's certainly plural bananas.

The senator raises an interesting point. In Confucius' Analects, there's a moment when Zi-lu swings by and says, "Sir, the Prince of Wei is waiting for you to conduct his state affairs. What would you do first?" And Confucius say, "It must be the rectification of characters." By "characters," he doesn't mean lovable characters like Arlen Specter and Trent Lott, but "characters" in the Chinese-language sense -- i.e., words. Confucius means that, if the words you're using aren't correct, it becomes impossible to conduct public policy. If you're misusing language, your legislation will be false -- or, as Confucius puts it, your "tortures and penalties will not be just right." When the "torture and penalty" for breaking U.S. law over many years is that you get a big check from the U.S. government, that would seem to be an almost parodic confirmation of Confucius' point.

This is not an "immigration" issue. "Immigration" is when you go into a U.S. government office and there's a hundred people filling in paperwork to live in America, and there are a couple of Slovaks, couple of Bangladeshis, couple of New Zealanders, couple of Botswanans, couple of this, couple of that. Assimilation is not in doubt because, if you're a lonely Slovak in Des Moines, it's extremely difficult to stay unassimilated.

This is not an "illegal immigration" issue. That's when one of the Slovaks or Botswanans gets tired of waiting in line for 12 years and comes in anyway, and lives and works here and doesn't pay any taxes, so the money he earns gets sluiced around the neighborhood supermarket and gas station and topless bar and the rest of the local economy, instead of being given to Trent and Arlen and Co. to toss into the great sucking maw of the federal budget.

But a "worker class" drawn overwhelmingly from a neighboring jurisdiction with another language and ancient claims on your territory and whose people now send so much money back home in the form of "remittances" that it's Mexico's largest source of foreign income (bigger than oil or tourism) is not "immigration" at all, but a vast experiment in societal transformation. Indeed, given the international track record of bilingual societies and neighboring jurisdictions with territorial claims, it's not much of an experiment so much as a safe bet on political instability.

What a guy! Be sure to read the whole piece. Did I mention this is a must read?