Now you, too, can be a virtual minuteman (or gal) by logging in at the Texas Border Watch test site. The welcome page explains….

As part of the Virtual Neighborhood Border Watch Program, the State of Texas has been testing video surveillance cameras in different environments along the 1240 miles of Texas/Mexico border using the internet to transmit the images. The last stage of the test is to stress the system by providing public access to numerous surveillance cameras.

Firefox users are out of luck but those of you with IE browsers could give it a spin. I suppose it will be like watching paint dry.

FoxNews has this AP story about Muslim gangs, the increasing violence they are producing in France, and the growing re-assessment of post-modern multiculturalism occuring there and elsewhere. The particular incidents are awful, but the resulting “awakening” might be the best thing to happen to France and many other European nations in a long time.  Modern man (who does not think that mere “ideas” are worth dying for — little is) just cannot understand why or how people would fight for such notions, especially religious notions (we are now Enlightened folks — wars were for the medeival Church barbarians who just wanted to plunder and control, right?).  He had better wake up. 

A portion from the article:

The recent ambush was emblematic of what some officers say has become a near-perpetual and increasingly violent conflict between police and gangs in tough, largely immigrant French neighborhoods that were the scene of a three-week paroxysm of rioting last year.

One small police union claims officers are facing a “permanent intifada.” Police injuries have risen in the year since the wave of violence.

….

More broadly, worsening violence in France testifies to Europe’s growing struggle to integrate its ethnic minorities. Some mainstream European politicians — adopting positions previously confined largely to far-right fringes — are suggesting that the minorities themselves are not doing enough to adapt to European mores.

In Britain, former Foreign Minister Jack Straw, now leader of the House of Commons, this month touched off a wide debate about the rights and obligations of Muslims by saying that he asks devout Muslim women to remove their veils when visiting his office. Prime Minister Tony Blair said Islam needs to modernize.

In France, a high school teacher received death threats, forcing him into hiding, after he wrote a newspaper editorial in September saying Muslim fundamentalists are trying to muzzle Europe’s democratic liberties.

Ethnic integration and violence against police are both becoming issues in the campaign for the French presidency. Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, the leading contender on the right, said this month that those who do not love France do not have to stay, echoing a longtime slogan of the extreme-right National Front: “France, love it or leave it.”

Michel Thooris, head of the small Action Police union, claims that the new violence is taking on an Islamic fundamentalist tinge.

“Many youths, many arsonists, many vandals behind the violence do it to cries of ‘Allah Akbar’ (God is Great) when our police cars are stoned,” he said in an interview.

From the Washington Post:

The Senate gave final approval last night to legislation authorizing the construction of 700 miles of double-layered fencing on the U.S.-Mexico border, shelving President Bush’s vision of a comprehensive overhaul of U.S. immigration laws in favor of a vast barrier.

. . .

The Secure Fence Act authorizes the construction of at least two layers of reinforced fencing around the border town of Tecate, Calif., and a huge expanse stretching from Calexico, Calif., to Douglas, Ariz. — virtually the entire length of Arizona’s border with Mexico. Another expanse would stretch over much of the southern border of New Mexico, with another section winding through Texas, from Del Rio to Eagle Pass, and from Laredo to Brownsville.

The final vote in the Senate, last night, was 80-19. Keep in mind the fence serves to channel immigration to areas where it can, hopefully, be managed.

Over at LewRockwell.com, Stephen Cox has an essay up challenging libertarians who favor open borders.  Here is a taste:

Ideally, immigration to America would be restricted to people who understand and support the American constitutional system and the American idea of limited government. But such ideological monitoring is impossible. Most native-born Americans have only a slender hold on the concept of limited government (a good reason not to render the system even more fragile by increasing the numbers of people like them). They will never approve any useful test of ideological sympathies. An oath to support the Constitution is useless. Every president takes such an oath, and you see where that has led us.

The best we can do is to admit immigrants sparingly, not by the tens of millions; to judge their economic fitness by their skills and education, not by their mere presence, and to be especially restrictive about immigration from cultures that do not prepare people for life in a libertarian society. Individual refugees from regions dominated by Islamic fundamentalists should certainly be admitted, but it would be suicide to permit any large or indiscriminate migration. Meanwhile, immigration of professionals or other skilled workers from politically favorable countries should be freed from the ridiculous bureaucratic processes that currently torture and demean people who are trying to immigrate legally, while unskilled illegals continue flooding in.

I could be wrong, but I think this is a really stupid decision.

The voters want Congress to do something to secure our borders, but the Republicans will instead ”concentrate on national security issues they believe play to their political strength.”

Hmmm. I thought securing our borders was a “national security issue.”

U.S. Congressman Mike Pence (R-IN) has teamed up with Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison to come up with an immigration reform package that, I think, most U.S. citizens can support. They are the authors of an op-ed piece on this subject in a July 26 issue of the Washington Times. In part they say….

…We are putting forth a proposal that we hope can be used as the basis for new discussions. Our plan is tough on border security, but it recognizes the need for a temporary-worker program that operates without amnesty and without growing into a huge new government bureaucracy.
Our plan begins with border reinforcement. The millions who come to our country seeking jobs to support their families are not a security threat to our nation, but the weaknesses in the nearly 7,000 miles of international border and 95,000 miles of shoreline have given terrorists, drug dealers and human traffickers an opening that is being exploited; this is a risk we cannot allow to continue. Part two of our plan is a temporary-worker program that is essential in order to fill jobs in our economy that are in high demand. This program would commence only after the borders are fixed. …

The immigration debate may be wearing thin and many Americans with their short attention spans may be on the brink of tuning out. I confess that I’m getting tired of hearing about it. Not a good idea…. since Islamic fascists are determined as ever to kill us as we are willing to nod off. Getting a grip on border security is essential if we truly want to avoid sporadic domestic attacks. Bush administration officials like to say that we are fighting terrorists abroad so we don’t have to fight them here. Well, although true, if our government doesn’t get its butt in gear on border security we will be fighting at home and abroad.

I’m convinced that it’s the cheap labor lobby that’s bogging down progress. No doubt, chicken moguls like John Tyson and Bo Pilgrim spread enough campaign money around like manure to ensure ICE stays off their backs. In a recent interview, Bo says…

“We’re not looking for cheap labor [OK, yeah, whatever]. We’re looking for available labor,” said Lonnie “Bo” Pilgrim, chairman of Pilgrim’s Pride Corp., the poultry giant based in Pittsburg.

Mr. Pilgrim and other members said there aren’t enough non-immigrant workers willing to do low-skill or labor-intensive work such as catching chickens, milking cows and cleaning hotel rooms.

“How many people can you get to squat down and catch chickens?” Mr. Pilgrim said, noting that his company was short 250 workers at the end of last week.

Again, border security is #1. If the Pence plan can subsequently deal with the real or perceived cheap labor shortage, then maybe Bo and I will both be satisfied.

Over at VDARE.com, Tom Tancredo has a piece up on a plan to convert several of branches of Denver’s public library into bilingual libraries with large Spanish-language holdings. According to the essay, Spanish was to be a required language for all newly hired staff, and new acquisitions in those branches were to be heavily weighted to Spanish-language materials. The piece goes on to describe on how proponents of the bilingual facilities have skewed statistics to make it appear that there is a need for them.

WorldNetDaily has an interesting article up linking increased crime and racial tension in the inner cities to increased illegal immigration.   Here is a taste:

National crime statistics released by the FBI show homicides up 5 percent last year. But the real story, say experts, is what is happening in urban pockets across the country, where murders – increasingly across racial lines – are way up.

In Philadelphia’s 12th Police District shootings have almost doubled over the past year.

In Boston, the homicide rate is soaring.

In Orlando, the homicide count has reached 37, surpassing the city’s previous record.

All of this follows a national trend of decreasing violent crime through 2002. 

 In 2005, jurisdictions with populations between 50,000 and 250,000 saw homicide increases of about 12.5 percent – far larger than the big cities, says David Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

“Those numbers tell only part of the story,” he said. “Serious crime is concentrated in certain areas within poor black and Hispanic neighborhoods. For people who live in the Trinidad area of Washington, in the Nickerson Gardens housing complex in South Los Angeles and on Magnolia Street in Boston, the citywide statistics have always been meaningless. Their neighborhoods are war zones.”

More people are noticing that much of the violence is at least partly racially motivated and tied directly to the rapid increase in Hispanic population over the last decade – much of it due to illegal immigration.

VDARE has up a letter from a former California police officer who offers his experiences with the INS and explains just when the feds stopped caring about illegal immigration. 

According to this news article, baby No. 300 million will likely be Hispanic.  Considering the failure to enforce immigration laws, the baby will probably be a child of illegals to boot.

As for long-term projections, according to the AP:

By the time the U.S. population hits 400 million, in the 2040s, white non-Hispanics will be but a bare majority. Hispanics are projected to make up close to one-quarter of the population, and blacks more than 14 percent. Asians will increase their share of the population to more than 7 percent.

Republican Brian Bilbray, who on Tuesday won the 50th District House seat held by convicted former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, said opposing Bush on immigration turned his campaign around.

“The president proposing amnesty was absolutely a big problem,” Bilbray said. “In fact, it wasn’t until I was able to highlight the fact that I did not agree with my friends in the Senate or my friend in the White House on amnesty that you really saw the polls start supporting me strongly.”

Message to the GOP:  Oppose the President and his amnesty plans and you just might have a shot of gaining or retaining elected office. 

This is a solid column.  Here’s a taste from the introduction: 

 On May 25, despite heroic resistance from patriots like Jeff Sessions (R.-AL), the U.S. Senate passed S.2611—which should properly be called the Kennedy-Bush Amnesty/ Immigration Acceleration bill, since it is fundamentally a Democratic measure, supported by only a minority of Republicans, made possible solely by the fanatical support of the Bush White House. Among many other awful things, including amnesty, this disgusting special-interest feeding frenzy will at least double legal immigration from its current unprecedented highs. It is a further, giant step towards abolishing America. It is quite plainly treason.

Proposal to Implant Tracking Chips in Immigrants:

Scott Silverman, Chairman of the Board of VeriChip Corporation, has proposed implanting the company’s RFID tracking tags in immigrant and guest workers. He made the statement on national television earlier this week.

…In a related story, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe allegedly remarked to visiting U.S. senators Jeff Sessions (Alabama) and Arlen Specter (Pennsylvania) that microchips could be used to track seasonal workers. “President Uribe said he would consider having Colombian workers have microchips implanted in their bodies before they are permitted to enter the U.S. for seasonal work,” Specter told Congress on April 25. (emphasis mine)

Me: I don’t know, but at first blush it sounds a bit creepy and perhaps inhumane. I mean, why not just tag their ears too?

Maybe it’s just me, but I think I’d rather at least exhaust the options of enforcing current laws and building fences before we start “Bourne Identifying” people.

Samuelson’s column on the immigration bill is most definitely the must-read of the AM.

The Senate last week passed legislation that Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., hailed as “the most far-reaching immigration reform in our history.” You might think that the first question anyone would ask is how much it would actually increase or decrease legal immigration. But no. After the Senate approved the bill by 62 to 36, you could not find the answer in the news columns of The Washington Post, New York Times or Wall Street Journal. Yet, the estimates do exist and are fairly startling. By rough projections, the Senate bill would double the legal immigration that would occur during the next two decades from about 20 million (under present law) to about 40 million.

One job of journalism is to inform the public what our political leaders are doing. In this case, we failed. The Senate bill’s sponsors didn’t publicize its full impact on legal immigration, and we didn’t fill the void. It’s safe to say that few Americans know what the bill would do because no one has told them. Indeed, I suspect that many senators who voted for the legislation don’t have a clue as to the potential overall increase in immigration.

John Derbyshire explains the likely decision-making calculus of the average currently-illegal immigrant. 

The way the immigration rules are (and, on the Senate plan, will continue to be) structured, citizenship isn’t actually worth a damn unless you just have some irrational, sentimental desire to be an American. It is, in fact, a bit of a nuisance in one respect. Citizens have to do jury duty, but green-card holders don’t. The positive things that citizenship gets you are the right to vote, and the right to hold certain government jobs needing security clearance. Otherwise there isn’t a whole lot of difference between citizenship and green-card status. Both are liable for the same taxes; both have to register for the draft. Since only around half of U.S. citizens bother to vote in national elections, the other half would, for all practical purposes, be better off as green-card holders, in that they’d be excused jury duty. And in fact there is a campaign for giving voting rights to aliens—New York City Council has debated a bill on the subject—so even in the matter of voting, citizenship may not be a benefit for much longer.

Plus, one may wonder just how thoroughly the voter registration bureaucracy would distinguish between citizens and non-citizens in an increasingly immigrant-filled future.

Human Events Online is all over this issue. You can see how your senator voted here. As far as Republicans…..it’s getting easier now to seperate the wheat from the chaf and see who the real conservatives are. It’s clear to me that for many senators this issue is not about immigration. It must be about government espansion and pandering to a group of potential new voters. Gag me. And, by the way, Human Events wants to hear from you regarding the impact of this vote on Republican presidential wannabes in ‘08. So far, senators such as Cornyn and Sessions are doing the Lord’s work.

Here are the features of the bill, which was drafted by the office of Teddy Kennedy: 

Urging the hiring of 1,000 more Border Patrol agents this year and 14,000 by 2011.

Endorsing Bush’s plan for a short-term deployment of National Guard troops to states along the border with Mexico.

Calling for the construction of 370 miles of fencing on the border.

The guest worker program would admit 200,000 individuals a year. They eventually could apply for a green card, which confers legal permanent residency.

A separate program envisions admission of an estimated 1.5 million immigrant farm workers who also may apply for permanent residency

For illegal immigrants, those in the country for five years could stay, keep working and eventually apply for citizenship. They would have to pay at least $3,250 in fines and fees, settle back taxes and learn English.

Illegal immigrants in the country for more than two years but less than five would have to travel to a point of entry before re-entering the United States legally and beginning the lengthy process of seeking citizenship.

An immigrant in the country illegally for less than two years would be required to leave with no guarantee of return.

Here’s my problem with the amnesty provisions.  The Senate depends on the illegal alien, the person who broke the law, to come clean and truthfully inform the government of how long they have resided here.  Yeah, right.  Many of these aliens already have fraudulent documents, so obtaining “proof” that they have been in the U.S. for more than five years should be no problem.  In other words, this might as well be amnesty for the lot of them.

This piece will make you think differently about the efficacy of National Guard troops on the U.S.-Mexico border.  It reminds us that human traffic is not the only traffic to be deterred.  The drug cartels are not going to take kindly to being harassed along their trade routes. If the Guard is not equiped and authorized to respond to violent intrusion into our territory, this could be a mess.  Fence construction, observing and reporting may be their only role.  I also wonder if the Border Patrol is going to snitch out the Guard locations to Mexican authorities the way they do the Minutemen.  We’ve discussed the tendency for the U.S. to throw half-measures at serious problems before.  These drug guys are mean as snakes and are a formidable enemy when confronted by law enforcement.  As a reminder, I encourage you to listen to this NPR story about such an incident.  I still find it unbelievable that we let these clowns get away with this stuff.

You might find the following interesting/enlightening:

*  Mark Steyn considers inter alia the Senate vote conferring Social Security coverage on illegal immigrants.

*  The Opinionator makes some demographic predictions for the next hundred years.

*  Roger Scruton has some thoughts on John Stuart Mill, on the bicentennial of his birth.

*  Kevin Hassett reports on the current troubles of certain high-profile plaintiffs’ lawyers.

*  The 2006 edition of the Pacific Research Institute’s ranking of the states as to tort law is now available online.

Dana Milbank’s column today is a remarkably nasty personal attack on Sen. Jeff Sessions (R.-Ala.), apparently triggered by Sessions’s positions on immigration policy and border control.  “Forget Politics. This Battle Is Personal” begins with this:

Alabama’s Jeff Sessions sure knows how to nurse a grudge. Talking about his family earlier this year, the Republican senator recalled that “Lincoln killed one of them at Antietam.”

Now he is turning his prodigious anger on legislation the Senate is expected to approve on Thursday that would allow millions of illegal immigrants to become citizens. In the process, Sessions is taking on the White House, his leaders in the Senate, the Congressional Budget Office and business interests at home.

Nowhere in the column does Milbank explain how Sessions’s position is “personal,” nor does he plumb the source of Sessions’s “prodigious anger” or explain how Sessions’s positions are a function of some “grudge” of his.  Instead, the reader is treated to a textbook example of ad hominem argument, including this passage:  

A short, wiry man with protruding ears, Sessions has become the Lou Dobbs of the Senate. He argues his points not with the courtly Southern tones of the late senator Howell Heflin (D), his predecessor, but with the harsh twang of a country tough — which, in a sense, he is.

So, the reader is left to speculate that, maybe, Sessions opposes an open-border approach simply because he’s a mean-spirited, vicious redneck.

That’s the Washington Post I know and love.

More on Sessions and immigration from A Bama Blog, including a link to this John O’Sullivan column, calling Sessions “a hero of commensense in this debate.”

Update:  Steve Sailer is all over this.

Further update:  Lee at A Bama Blog has a very thorough response to Milbank here.

From Time …..

Pence, a rising star in the House, is suggesting a temporary worker program based on a data base run by private industry. And unlike the leading plan in the Senate and the blueprint sketched by Bush, his “Border Integrity and Immigration Reform Act” would require all applicants to leave the country first. Pence tweaks a phrase from Bush’s address to the nation by calling the compromise “a REAL rational middle ground.” Even though Bush has said his preferred solution “ain’t amnesty,” Pence appeals to hard-liners by calling the compromise a “no-amnesty solution.” …

His plan includes all the security measures of the bill that has already passed the House, and adds a provision for guest worker visas would be good for two years. A limited renewal would be available if the worker studied English and passed an English proficiency class. Federal law already has visa categories A through V. “The visas will be referred to as ‘W Visas,’ ” Pence say in his remarks. “No kidding. I think it is obvious whose support we are trying to garner here.”

As the U.S. Senate machinates over its amnesty scheme, what chance for citizenship do you suppose a documented, English speaking, professional will have?  Ilya Shapiro can give you a pretty good idea in this commentary.

This month’s featured article from First Things is an excellent essay by Professor Mary Ann Glendon on immigration. Here’s a taste:

Nevertheless, given the importance of the rule of law to most Americans, solutions will have to be found that avoid the appearance of rewarding law-breakers, yet shift the focus in individual cases to how the immigrants have comported themselves while in residence here. Proposals that draw on the time-honored concept of rehabilitation after paying one’s debt to society seem to point toward a path between amnesty and punitiveness.

In a follow up to yesterday’s posts on the matter…

The Senate voted yesterday to allow illegal aliens to collect Social Security benefits based on past illegal employment — even if the job was obtained through forged or stolen documents.

…”It makes no sense to reward millions of illegal immigrants for criminal behavior while our Social Security system is already in crisis,” said Sen. Jim DeMint, South Carolina Republican. “Why in the world would we endorse this criminal activity with federal benefits?”

Me: This owns me. I feel like I’m watching a TV sitcom. I’m just waiting for it to end so we can get down to serious debate on illegal immigration. Where is the sobriety in all of this? The logic? The respect for the law? Anything? Did Dick Durbin really say that this piece of legislation was “not fair?” I would love to hear his definition of what “fair” is.

And again, I’m so disappointed in Sam Brownback. I really am. He may be great on abortion, Darfur, etc…but this seriously zaps my confidence in him. Down deep in my heart, I’m still holding on to the hope that he has some airtight, impenetrable defense for his actions that I’m just not aware of…but I fear he doesn’t.

You could use this absolutely mind-boggling post of Hugh Hewitt’s this afternoon.  Just go read it. 

Answer: Yes.

Mexico, a country with a strict immigration policy, is threatening America with a lawsuit if the National Guard engages in active detainment of illegal immigrants.

  “If there is a real wave of rights abuses, if we see the National Guard starting to directly participate in detaining people … we would immediately start filing lawsuits through our consulates,” Foreign Secretary Luis Ernesto Derbez told a Mexico City radio station. He did not offer further details.

Okay, someone pinch me so I can wakeup from this dream.  Mexico, a country that believes in shooting first and then asking questions when a person appears illegal, is threatening to sue the US if we use the military for its rightful purpose - securing our borders.  However, the most worrisome is

Some Mexican newspapers criticized President Vicente Fox for not taking a stronger stand against the measure, even though Fox called Bush to express his concerns.

A political cartoon in the Mexico City newspaper Reforma depicted Bush as a gorilla carrying a club with a flattened Fox stuck to it.

Fox’s spokesman, Ruben Aguilar, said Tuesday that Mexico accepted Bush’s statement that the sending in the National Guard didn’t mean militarizing the area. He also said Mexico remained “optimistic” that the U.S. Senate would approve an immigration reform “in the interests of both countries.”

While I support legal immigration, I am concerned a national security issue is being compromised on a variety of levels.  Why are we trying to pacify another nation regarding immigrants coming from an oppressive country?  A country these people are fleeing from at all costs:

Juan Canche, 36, traveled more than 1,200 miles to the border from the southern town of Izamal and said nothing would stop him from trying to cross.

“Even with a lot of guards and soldiers in place, we have to jump that puddle,” said Canche, referring to the drought-stricken Rio Grande dividing Ciudad Juarez and El Paso, Texas. “My family is hungry and there is no work in my land. I have to risk it.”

Provided our borders are secure, I support an increase in legal immigration and a temporary guest worker program.    However, Mexico and other countries that force their citizens to flee their borders and often encourage illegal immigration must be held accountable for resulting crisis.  As a result, Mexico should have not have any input or influence in the American immigration policy.

Here, here, and here.

From Riehl World View:

Unfortunately, visitors to a Bush ‘43′ Library may have to cross the border into Mexico to take it all in. In a speech which was as much a eulogy for the so-called Reagan Revolution, as it was an unfortunate beginning to a pending political battle on immigration, President Bush all but declared himself irrelevant to the conversation. In essence, the sitting President of the United States through up his hands and declared, “No mas.”

. . .

Conservative Republicans and center-right democrats and independents will have to start asking themselves if it is worth fighting to try and take the Republican party back, or perhaps break off in a different direction. Certainly, that would mean a fall from any perception of power for a time. But President Bush’s Oval Office speech this evening put conservatives on notice that any perception of power they may have had up until now, was only that - a perception, at best.

 From Wizbang:

1) The National Guard will be called out — to watch from a distance and build some fences. The 6,000 total refers to how many individuals will be sent to the border over the course of a year. If they go in the traditional two-week stints, we’re talking an additional 231 Guardsmen at a time. Skipping the fence-building aspect and presuming all they do is watch for illegal aliens, and that they do it 8-hour shifts, that means each Guardsman would be responsible for 25 miles of border. Can I have a “BFD” from the choir?

The Q and O Blog:

What the administration has spent the last couple of years doing is explaining that we need the wogs to do the nasty jobs that lazy Americans won’t do, therefore, we need to give them some path to citizenship, so that lazy, fat Americans don’t have to pick vegetables. He stayed away from that line of reasoning this evening. But, that seems to me like a politically-motivated conversion, rather than a statement of Mr. Bush’s core principles.

His pledge to strengthen border enforcement by adding 6,000 guardsmen, and replacing them over time with 6,000 new Border Patrol agents sounds interesting superficially. But it ignores the fact that, so far, his domestic budgets have made the doubling of the BP a financial impossibility. That says more about the Bush Administration’s preferred policy than his speech of this evening.

From The Corner’s Andrew Stuttaford:

It’s hard to say what was most discouraging about the President’s miserable performance last night. Was it the dishonesty (the non-amnesty amnesty, and the way that his opponents in this debate were characterized)? Was it the implicit admission of incompetence (he’s only now ’discovered’ that the National Guard is, apparently, needed at the border)? Was it the economic illiteracy (the idea that there is a shortage of labor)? Or was it the refusal to learn anything from Europe’s disastrous ‘guestworker’ experience? Incredible.

Pundit Guy:

George W. Bush is an “open-borders” president, and it’s clear that no one, not even the base of voters his party needs to keep power will change his position. We need to keep the pressure on this congress and those who are coming up hoping to take residence in the White House. We must secure our borders and everything must be done to see that this happens. Bush’s half measures won’t do. We need to press on and demand a better plan.

The Socialist Worker website seems pretty giddy about the new struggle talking place in the U.S. between illegals and law-abiding citizens.  Here is a tatse of what they have ready for us:

May 1, 2006, holds the potential to begin to revive that tradition, from America’s grassroots. The movement’s most powerful slogan, “a day without immigrants,” is based upon a strategy of social struggle tied explicitly to the power of workers to withhold their labor–which successfully built the U.S. union movement in the first few decades of the 20th century.

. . . .

Today, Mexicans, El Salvadorans and other Latinos have brought with them traditions of class struggle absent since McCarthyism excised radicals from the U.S. labor movement in the 1950s. These traditions hold the potential to revitalize the U.S. labor movement, if it welcomes them.