Who's Gonna Build Your Wall?

"Tom Russell is Johnny Cash, Jim Harrison, and Charles Bukowski all rolled into one. I feel a great affinity with Tom Russell's songs, for he is writing from the wounded heart of America."

--Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Tom Russell, one of America's great songwriters, has a new CD out, and he appeared on The Late Show With David Letterman Tuesday night to sing a blistering (and funny) song about immigration.

Russell isn't a household name, probably because he writes the kind of music that he likes, not what he think the masses will like.

He sang on Letterman "Who's Gonna Build Your Wall," a song that appears on his new CD, "Wounded Heart of America." I imagine this was written from his home in El Paso, and it's an absolutely genius take on the state of the immigration debate in America. Here are the opening lyrics.

I've got 800 miles of open border right outside my door.
There's minute men in little pick up trucks who've declared their own damn war.
Now the government wants to build a barrier like old Berlin 8 feet tall
But if uncle Sam sends the illegals home who's gonna build the wall?

WHO'S GONNA BUILD YOUR WALL BOYS? WHO'S GONNA MOW YOUR LAWN?
WHO'S GONNA COOK YOUR MEXICAN FOOD WHEN YOUR MEXICAN MAID IS GONE?
WHO'S GONNA WAX THE FLOORS TONIGHT DOWN AT THE LOCAL MALL?
WHO'S GONNA WASH YOUR BABY'S FACE? WHO'S GONNA BUILD YOUR WALL?

You can watch the Letterman appearance here:

You also can listen to the song on Russell's My Space website.

And here's Russell's homepage.

Go buy his album, OK? Cuz you probably won't be reading a review in the New York Times.

America is Not 400 Years Old

Americans tend to view history relative to us, us, us. Just as the earth revolves around the sun, Americans tend to think the world revolves around the 300 million souls fortunate enough to live in this great country.

I thought of this while glancing at the cover of the most recent issue of Time magazine, which is a report on the Jamestown settlement 400 years ago. The big headline on the cover is AMERICA AT 400.

Such coverage has been a bit of a trend lately. Earlier this year the historians over at U.S. News declared on the cover that the Jamestown settlers were The First Americans, which should come as a surprise to all the people ... who were already here.

These headlines are grade school history at its worst.

The English who immigrated here, free to enter because the Native peoples had not erected a large Lou Dobbs-inspired barbwire fence, were NOT the first Americans.

This "country" had a civilization and a culture well before the English arrived. We had cities on the level of Paris and London right here in 'Merica well before the Jamestown settlement, and predating Leif Eriksson, the man credited as the European "discoverer" of North America about 1,000 years ago.

I think we do ourselves a disservice when we measure the history of this land starting in 1607.

America likes to think of itself as the center of the world. That the 3,000 dead on 9/11 are somehow more important than the 655,000 Iraqis* that a team of epidemiologists estimates have died in Iraq because of the war.

We are all equal in God’s eyes.

If Americans think they’ll enjoy the same insular standard of living come heaven-time, they’re wrong, because inside those Pearly Gates they’re going to be sharing that Jacuzzi-tub not only with St. Peter, but with someone who probably doesn’t speak English.

Oh, and St. Peter didn't speak English either. Just like Jesus, his native tongue was Aramaic, and his skin was dark.

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This entry is largely a cut-and-paste from a January entry, when U.S. News ran its Jamestown cover. I wonder if I'll get another opportunity to test my cutting and pasting skills again if the historians at Newsweek ever take a crack at America's 400th "birthday"?

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* Here's the sourcing (Washington Post account) for the 655,000 number.

And here are some other 'Mericans whom Time and U.S. News didn't think were worth remembering: here and here.

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Baseball Statistics for Lou Dobbs

In honor of baseball's opening day yesterday, here are some statistics* to frighten Lou Dobbs.

* In 1965, 90 percent of major league players were born in the United States. Cuba, with 26 players, topped the 11 other places represented.

* In 2006, 72 percent of major league players were born in the United States. The Dominican Republic, with 146 players, topped the 20 other places represented.

I wonder if Lou thinks it'd be a good idea to erect a giant fence around Major League Baseball? Wouldn't Lou say that the likes of Rod Carew (Panama) and Albert the Great (Dominican Republic) stole/steal jobs from American boys?

Lou?

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Also in honor of Opening Day, here's my February prediction about Barry Bonds. Bonds will break the classy Hank Aaron's all-time home run record, I'm guessing, in July against the Cubs, which should send many baseball fans into a Roid Rage worthy of Bonds himself.

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* Statistics from New York Times via Stats Inc.

B.W.I.: Blogging While Intoxicated

2:24 a.m.

Tonight (or was that last night?) was my FINAL St. Pat's Day party of 2007, concluding three straight weekends of parties put on by people whose names included Shane and Seamus; Meghan and Miles; Patrick and Peaches.

I love you guys!

He's An American; His Ancestors Weren't

Just a reminder to all my Irish friends: I want you ALL to raise a toast to Lou Dobbs tomorrow. I don't care if you're toasting with green sudsy liquids or something a little bit stronger, just do it.

Earlier: My special St. Patrick's Day Message for Lou (including the suggested verbiage for a possible toast) can be found here.

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Mexicans Are The New Irish

A Special St. Patrick's Day
Message for Lou Dobbs

Some of my best friends are ... Irish.

I'm blessed in this way. They have great Irish surnames like Flannery, O'Flannery and McFlannery. As I said, truly blessed.

Starting last weekend, and continuing this weekend (St. Patrick's Day is Saturday) and still continuing the weekend after that, I'll be celebrating St. Patrick's Day at pubs, parades and parties put on by various friends with great names like Patrick or Paddy, Seamus or Shane.

With so much love for the Irish during this time of year, it's easy to forget just how much the Irish in America used to be hated. Despised, really.

Let's review the history.

Around the middle of the 19th century -- say, roughly 1840 - 1860 -- there were lots of Lou Dobbs-like characters who were hell bent on whipping up hatred of Irish-Catholic immigrants for many of the same reasons that Lou Dobbs whips up hatred of Mexican immigrants (also usually Catholic) today.

Back then, the ire revolved around the competition these new immigrants posed for housing and jobs in America's Protestant-packed cities. There was also a strong anti-Catholic religious element as well. People were a-feared of the pope sticking his beanie-capped head into American politics via Irish-Catholic Democratic politicians (The 19th Century Teddy Kennedys, if you will.) The thought among the radicals was that Catholics sought to take over the United States and install the Pope as its leader, a sentiment so strong that JFK faced these same questions when he ran for President in 1960.

So just as Lou Dobbs is fearful of Mexicans today because they supposedly take good jobs (like picking lettuce) away from Americans, men like Dobbs in the 1850s pumped up a similar fever-pitch against the Irish, many of whom were fleeing the Irish Potato Famine and (also like Mexicans today) just trying to make sure their families didn't starve.

Back then, the anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant crowd had their own political party, The American Party, also known by other names, such as the Know-Nothing Party.

They were quite successful, as third parties go, including a presidential ticket in 1856 that included a former president, Millard Fillmore, who received almost one in four of the votes cast that year. (The gay guy, James Buchanan, won this race. And, as a sidenote, I wonder if the current anti-gay party, the Republicans, will look as foolish 100 years from now?)

Lou Dobbs probably would have been a Fillmore-button-wearing and card-carrying member of the Know-Nothing party had he lived back in the 1850s.

There is one big difference between the Know-Nothings of the 1850s and the present-day Lou Dobbs. These haters of yesteryear didn't reinvent themselves and go on populist rants just for want of better ratings, as Lou Dobbs has and does, since cable TV (of course) had not been invented yet. In any case, The Know-Nothings would have LOVED to have played hard-ball and engage in all the shouting that goes on on cable TV news programs. Like Bill O'Reilly and Lou Dobbs and Chris Matthews, they'd probably have top-rated shows.

So on St. Patrick's day, I want all my Irish friends to turn the other cheek. I want them to raise their frosty and frothy mugs, filled with green sudsy liquids, and to give a special toast to Mr. Lou Dobbs himself -- and to all of Mr. Lou Dobbs' ancestors who had the good sense to immigrate to this fine country.

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Suggested Toast for Lou: May the wind always be at your back, and may the windbag anti-immigration hysteria on CNN be kept to an absolute minimum.

Related: Gays Are The New Irish.

More Immigrants = Less Crime?

Last weekend, I watched the 1983 Al Pacino film Scarface. It's about one man (Pacino) and his compadres who were part of a wave of Cuban immigrants dumped on the United States by Fidel Castro in the early 1980s.

The result? Higher crime rates in south Florida, and, after 1983, lots of people with affected accents trying to act like Al Pacino trying to act like what Cubans are supposed to act like.

The day after viewing the movie, the New York Times Magazine ran an interesting story addressing the question about whether immigration leads to higher crime rates. There's good data to indicate that it doesn't.

Lou Dobbs can't be happy about this.

Ramiro Martinez Jr., a professor of criminal justice at Florida International University, has sifted through homicide records in border cities like San Diego and El Paso, both heavily populated by Mexican immigrants, both places where violent crime has fallen significantly in recent years. “Almost without exception,” he told me, “I’ve discovered that the homicide rate for Hispanics was lower than for other groups, even though their poverty rate was very high, if not the highest, in these metropolitan areas.” He found the same thing in the Haitian neighborhoods of Miami. In his book “New York Murder Mystery,” the criminologist Andrew Karmen examined the trend in New York City and likewise found that the “disproportionately youthful, male and poor immigrants” who arrived during the 1980s and 1990s “were surprisingly law-abiding” and that their settlement into once-decaying neighborhoods helped “put a brake on spiraling crime rates.”

The most prominent advocate of the “more immigrants, less crime” theory is Robert J. Sampson, chairman of the sociology department at Harvard. A year ago, Sampson was an author of an article in The American Journal of Public Health that reported the findings of a detailed study of crime in Chicago. Based on information gathered on the perpetrators of more than 3,000 violent acts committed between 1995 and 2002, supplemented by police records and community surveys, it found that the rate of violence among Mexican-Americans was significantly lower than among both non-Hispanic whites and blacks.

One not-so-fun-fact in the story: First generation immigrants mired in poverty don't turn to crime, but it is the second-generation immigrants -- the ones who have been discriminated against, beaten down and been here long enough to start imitating their American counterparts -- who are more likely to turn to crime.

Second-generation immigrants in Chicago were significantly more likely to commit crimes than their parents, it turns out, and those of the third generation more likely still.

Opponents of immigration frequently charge that Mexican immigrants threaten America’s national identity because of their failure to assimilate. A more reasonable concern might be the opposite of this: not that foreigners in low-income neighborhoods refuse to adopt the norms of the native culture but that their children and grandchildren do.

Isn't that a little sad?

I wish we could all start acting like Canadians, or at least acting like Al Pacino acting like what he thinks a Canadian should act like.

Hooah!