From the "War on Drugs" to the "War on Immigrants"

You can sum up American immigration law this way: There's us, and there's them. They're different, and we're better. It's an old, old story, older than Servs vs. Croats, older than Hatfields vs. McCoys, older than Capulets vs. Montagues. It goes back to the biblical scapegoat, to the sacrificial vestal virgins, and the like: Let'[s take our fears and put them on someone or something else, and then kill it or run it out of town. Then we'll be safe.

(Dan Kowalski, "The Moral Physics of Immigration" in the May 5, 2006 Texas Observer. The Texas Observer, by the way, is sort of an all-War on Immigrants issue. On-line, Forrest Wilder ("South Texas Hold-em") reports on one Texas industry's profits from the "illegal immigrants are bad" craze -- the private prisons (... oops, "detention centers") the rest of the world seems content to ignore. Buy the magazine for the Dan Kowalki's article and Beatrice Edward's long review of "Lockout: Why America Keeps Getting Immigration Wrong When Our Prosperity Depends on Getting it Right (Michele Wucker, Public Affairs, 288 pp., 25.95 USD) Besides, the Texas Observer is the best damn magazine in Texas, featuring REAL TEXANS like Mollie Ivans and Jim Hightower and Erasmo Guerra (and financed by Waco's only Jewish, Socialist multi-millionaire, Bernie Rappaport), not wannabe Texans like that drunken coke-head preppies from Midland...