Imigration in America

[Jester]

No, so long as you have controlled borders, whatever the ease, or difficulty, in crossing them. Robert Frost: Good fences make good neighbors.

If I recall my Frost, the message was a touch more ambiguous than that. But, even charitably, a fence is not just a boundary, it is a place of mutual agreement. I'm sure I don't need to tell you that in Mexico, and indeed in the US, there are plenty of things that do not love a wall. Unilateral enforcement is swimming against the current, at best.

Controlling a border is relatively easy when you're only looking out for a handful of wanted criminals. It's basically impossible when you're trying to stop the flow of hundreds of thousands of people and billions of dollars in drugs across a border two thousand miles long. How controllable a border is depends on what you mean by control, what your objective is. Change your objectives, and control will be much easier. Keep the existing ones, and I bet you never gain control of labour migration, let alone the drug trade, or violent gangs.

Beyond the drug trade is human trafficking, which is a dirtier, nastier problem in its own right.

Indeed, but only because there is a business in it. Trafficking people across borders where migration is not sharply restricted is a job for Greyhound, not for drug gangs. But so long as wage differentials persist, and yet the flow of migrants is sharply restricted, you're going to get human trafficking, and very ugly people are going to make money off of it.

-Jester

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We'd read at least 150 major novels (triple that for the college prep programs).

This all sounds like my high school experience, except for this. I took IB higher-level English, which is pretty much the international gold standard these days for literature at that level. I read plenty of neat stuff - Joseph Conrad, Robertson Davies, Garcia Marquez, James Joyce (the easy stuff, not the crazy stuff) lots of Shakespeare, Borges.. but even if you count plays, short story collections, poetry, and everything else, I still don't think I'd come up to 50 works, let alone 150, or (holy hell) 450.

If I wanted to read 450 major novels, I'd have to set aside at least a whole year, just for that, and even then I doubt I'd get it done. That's a colossal amount of reading. Did they really get everyone to do this?

-Jester