A Modest Proposal

tee bee

Re: They just want to come here

PaulNoonan wants to open the borders and be free to employ whomever he wants - in an effort to relieve Government of one of its burdens and thereby shrink it.

Chris and I (and many BBA members) want to continue to enjoy the prosperity we've earned through security; it's not that we're against small government, it's that government needs to effect one of its inarguable and sacred duties:

It must protect its citizens and their right to pursue life, liberty and property. Securing the borders must be the job of government, as is raising a standing army and fending off interlopers and attackers.

The failure of securing our borders weakens every aspect of our system, from the burgeoning level of social services available to the freedom to work in the World Trade Center or Pentagon without being blown up.

America is far from the first to engage this problem. Ireland was England's self-made Mexico. Jonathan Swift noted the hard circumstances of the Irish - the poverty and blight that forced them to leave their homes looking for any opportunity, begging, borrowing and stealing - and the burden this caused England.

Swift, an Anglo-Irish political essayist and author of Gulliver's Travels, whose father died before he was born in Dublin, Ireland, made his infamous proposal, which has been reprised many times. PJ O'Rourke's Eat the Rich owes its title to Swift.

I love Mexican food, but I'm not reprising Swift's proposal, though I agree with his assessment:

I think it is agreed by all parties that this prodigious number of children in the arms, or on the backs, or at the heels of their mothers, and frequently of their fathers, is in the present deplorable state of the kingdom a very great additional grievance; and, therefore, whoever could find out a fair, cheap, and easy method of making these children sound, useful members of the commonwealth, would deserve so well of the public as to have his statue set up for a preserver of the nation.

Therefore I offer my humble service and a strategy that will resolve this issue in a manner pleasing to all parties in less than a generation - much more quickly than any other proposal that has yet to be presented:

Annex Mexico now.

What do I ask in return? Swift's visage graces the Irish ten-pound note; let mine grace the new Estados Unidos twenty-five dollar bill.

CP @ GMC.