Give me your tired, your poor, your ... On Second thought, Don't

A woman I worked for who was forty two, heavy, and slightly bearded met a Mexican man fifteen years her junior who, within a month, proposed to her. She accepted quite readily since there was no way she was going to do any better. Then they got married. I think no one is going to be surprised to discover that he was in this country illegally - Gasp! My co-worker you might guess from my description was no prize (she thought she was. Nope) And you might think to yourself that she must have had a good heart - nope. No good heart, either.

When I think about how great America is I think of that poor Mexican. He sure did have to pay a price to live and work in this country. He still is, I imagine - every horrible, ghastly night of his dreadful existence. That of course is in addition to the fine he had to pay - two grand, I believe - to make up for being here illegally. This guy had some strange job I'd never heard of: he was a traveling plastic welder for government wetlands, which paid twenty five bucks an hour. That was according to his seldom honest wife and you could never really believe anything she said. So, who knows? It might have been true ... maybe.

There are eleven to twelve million foreign undocument workers in the United States and very few of them are going anywhere. In theory they should not be rewarded for breaking our laws by being granted amnesty, but they will be. In some form or another. I know, they drive down wages in the US, which, in case you haven't figured it out, is exactly why they're going to be staying. Low wages aren't good for you and me, but they are good for someone - the people who pay those low wages. And the people who pay those low wages are the same ones who keep our present gang of legislators in power (also the reason the federal minimum wage hasn't been raised in ten years). QED low wage illegal aliens are staying.

It's ironic, if not downright hypocritical that our dirt-poor low wage foreign ancestors got in free while these guys don't. Here's my story: The first Sommers who made it to America - my great, great Grandpa Jacob Sommers - supposedly burned down his barn in Bavaria for the insurance money and then used it to travel to New York. Us Sommerses have been committing insurance fraud ever since. C'mon, it's a family tradition.

Congress and the Senate (the Republican Congress and Senate) will come up with some immigration law soon, and the President will sign it because he signs everything that crosses his desk. Whatever is in that law won't matter, either, because it won't have anything to do with reality and Americans have a fine tradition of flouting stupid laws. Which is what this one undoubtedly will be. Americans, and I'm one, will see the inherent unfairness of penalizing people looking for opportunity because of when and where they were born.