The (Real) Day w/o a Mexican

The Day Without a Mexican made much better billboards and movie trailers than actual feature-size-and-duration entertainment, still the point overtly maneuvering across the narrative was well-honed: The economies of the Americas, norte y sur, are linked to degrees our immigration policies don't yet recognize or account for.

By mysteriously rapturing the brown out of LA (and exposing the inherent racism brooding above and below), the scriptwriters created the forum for a beautiful, and timely, political package.

Today, with a nation retargeting its media-stoked terrorism fixations and animosities on the OTAs (Other-Than-Amerikuns) we are beginning to see the fraying edges that herald worse to come unless Washington can come to grips with new modalities, like doing the right thing in spite of a rancorous few demanding a new war on the southern boundary.

Without an immediate shift back to sanity in the immigration dimension, we "run the risk of doing serious and reverberating harm to our national economic base," sez LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa in his recent letter to Homeland Man Michael Chertoff.

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