The real journalist is back, among other things to advise that one of the worst habits of contemporary journalists is to report the "cost" of something and not the "contribution." Suffice it to say, as Mark does exuberantly, that illegal immigrants cost California's, and for that matter the U.S., government money, lots of money. The appropriate, if politically challenging, response to that is to reduce the scope of government, including, as I've argued everywhere, indeed on Mark's show, the various subsidies that attract less than honorable immigrants.

Of course, as the great economist Frederic Bastiat noted more than a century ago, there are things which are seen and things which are not seen. The contribution of foreign workers, notwithstanding their legal status, is simply incalculable. Many reputable studies have been released showing the contributions exceed the cost. But I'm not going to engage in the numbers game, only to suggest that some of Mark's figures are highly suspect. That movie, "A Day Without Mexicans," almost certainly has it right. Pull them all, legal or illegal, out of their daily activity in this country, and we're in the toilet.

But I'm concerned here mainly with Mark's bundling of every pathology associated with foreign birth into one, sensational smack at immigration itself. Containers full of hapless Asian women destined for San Francisco's whorehouses. The arrival of the Russian and Ukrainian mafia. We're supposed to believe the Oaxacan worker, here to pick strawberries and send his earnings home, is the moral equivalent of a drug runner from Kiev? Then there's national security, a serious issue in this age of terrorism. The gardener up from Baja should be treated as Muhammad Atta?

Those issues need to be dealt with and separately. (One way to deal with underworld trafficking, a topic for another time, is to make the underworld the upperworld by legalizing much of the unpretty trade. I have seen where some of the Asian women come from, and I am not for a moment explaining away their horrible predicament, but I'm pretty certain many of these women know something about their destiny and opt for it anyway.)

Now that I've offended everyone, I'm wondering which alarms Mark and his confederates most: the incidence of undocumented foreign workers or the human trafficking/drug running issues. I come at this as a Christian, enjoined by my Creator to treat foreigners with dignity and not with suspicion. I also come at it as an American conservative who, resonating to President Bush's worldwide ambition (the same ambition of our founders), understands that the exigencies of the global marketplace are irreversible. The competition will be tough. It is often harder to abide by the moral demands of freedom than to expect the politicians, through some blanket coercive act, to protect us from the rest of the world.

That political enterprise will surely turn the principles of conservatism inside-out, making us all subordinate to government, requiring permission from Washington before we contract to do even the simplest work.

Enough. It's time we had that lunch, Mark.

A final thought on the nature of libel as it applies to the application of the term “slavery” to the issue of illegal immigration… America is a beacon of hope. Support for illegal immigration is an exploitation of desperation. I can imagine nothing more libelous to the idea of America than that.


Listen to KFBK weeknights from 7-10 PM for details on how you may join Roger Hedgecock and me banging pots and pans for immigration reform in the very belly of the beast, on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. this April 23-28!

Mark Williams
Weeknights 7 - 10 PM
News/Talk 1530 KFBK AM

I hate to disagree with Kenneth Grubbs, one of the few real journalists left, but the fact of the matter is that neither “migrant” nor “worker’ accurately describe today’s crop of illegal aliens.

The stereotype of the working stiff, with a strong back and noble heart, seeking to feed his family by traveling far from home during harvest season has been replaced by:

• Young Asian women, lured into a shipping container upon promises of the good life only to find a life of genuine slavery in the whorehouses of San Francisco or sweat shops of New York City
• White Russians and Ukraines, lured by similar promises, who find themselves in the “employ” of the Russian Mafia
• Latinos, and other Hispanics imported by the slave-traders to be expendable drug mules and gang-bangers, or perpetual residents of cardboard boxes in barrios while they daily await the panel van to take them to stoop-jobs for which they frequently do not get paid.

"Slavery" is also an accurate word. Don't think so? Recite any argument that one may imagine in favor of continued illegal immigration. Substitute "migrant worker" for either “African” or “Black”. The argument won’t change. Three squares and a steady job that is beneath white people (in the suport for illegal immigration "white people" is replaced by "Americans"). The only difference today is that rather than some slow-witted, quick-whipped single owner you and I hold shares in the plantation through our 401k or mutual funds, perhaps through a slave-labor or indentured servant subsidy in the produce or meat sections of the supermarket. How shameful is that?

That is only the tip of the iceberg. Even the liberal SN&R is, in this week’s issue a source of education to those who apply the word “migrant” in the place of “illegal”. Another obvious reference source is one that comes from the illegal alien “ground zero” – the California Central Valley – is Victor Davis Hanson’s “Mexifornia".

None of today’s debate over illegal immigration however should be engaged without first reading the 1988 collaborative work by Robert A. Pastor and Jorge G. Castañeda titled “Limits to Friendship”, an exploration of the mindset from the perspective of both sides of the border. It is a work that contributed to my transformation into a radical advocate of stopping what amounts to abuse of the actual honest, working stiff Mexicans at the hand of not only both governments, but of you and me.

In the process we harm ourselves. Below are just the most recent numbers

• More than 9-Billion dollars a year in costs to California taxpayers
• 330-Billion dollars lost to our national economy
• 11,000,000 – 20,000,000 illegal aliens in the nation, many - if not most - here as criminals (even the heartland, Kansas City, Mo. is under siege from illegal alien drug gangs for instance)
• 4,000,000 – 6,000,000 jobs formerly held by legal residents of the United States lost to illegal aliens since 1990 and wages for the working poor driven ever downward.

Add to all of the above the dilution and devaluation of our national sovereignty and you get the seeds for destruction of the United States of America.

We have already planted enough of those, in a world surrounded by entire cultures wielding watering cans and fertilizer to help them grow.


Listen to KFBK weeknights from 7-10 PM for details on how you may join Roger Hedgecock and me banging pots and pans for immigration reform in the very belly of the beast, on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. this April 23-28!

Mark Williams
Weeknights 7 - 10 PM
News/Talk 1530 KFBK AM

Ya'gotta love this!

Mexican Foreign Secretary, Luis Ernesto Derbez, says that Mexico will sue Arizona in international court over a voter-passed requirement that potential voters provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote and to provide identification at the polls! (Incidentally; Kalliefornia has no such requirement. Taking advantage of that this past Fall a Spanish-language Los Angeles radio talk show host ran an aggressive illegal alien voter registration drive, asking illegal aliens to obtain and submit voter registration cards in order that they be able to vote. Nobody knows how many illegals responded.)


Proposition 200, passed last November by Arizona voters and recently upheld (provisionally) by the U.S. courts also requires that state to comply with federal regulations prohibiting the disbursement of taxpayer-funded benefits to illegal aliens (a requirement routinely flaunted in California and elsewhere).

Coming in for special scorn by the Secretary is the 40% of U.S. Citizens of Mexican heritage who live in Arizona and who supported the law (it passed with nearly a 2/3 vote).

Gee…… guess what we’re talking about on KFBK tonight at 7:00

Listen to KFBK weeknights from 7-10 PM for details on how you may join Roger Hedgecock and me banging pots and pans for immigration reform in the very belly of the beast, on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. this April 23-28!

Mark Williams
Weeknights 7 - 10 PM
News/Talk 1530 KFBK AM

Regarding the despondent SUV driver who derailed the Metrolink trains in LA and now faces multiple murder charges, he was a U.S. citizen. Mark, citing fellow talk show host Roger Hedgecock, promoted the misinformation that the suspect was an illegal alien. My associate Ryan Rose this morning called the LA County District Attorney's Office with the question. No, the DA's office said, the man's a U.S. citizen.

Now that that's cleared up, it's also incorrect -- indeed, it's a libel on our land of the free -- to refer to migrant workers, with or without official U.S. government permission to work, as slave laborers. In slave societies, people struggle to leave their country. Here they're struggling to get in. They're looking for freedom to work, a condition their native lands deny them by multifarious means. Those means, made possible by more political power to regulate our labor, are precisely what the anti-immigration crowd in this country would construct here at home.