"Don't expect to see a real right-wing online movement with activist leanings to emerge without a death match against corporate elites."

I'll bring the popcorn!

Matt, have you watched Edwards' complete stump speech yet this cycle? If not, get up to New Hampshire or come visit us in Iowa and listen to the whole thing.

I don't agree with you that he fails to explain why poverty is so widespread. There is a narrative arc to his stump speech, and he ties a lot of things together.

I can't remember where I read this, but apparently during the Nixon administration there was an opportunity to enact some kind of health care reform bringing us closer to universal coverage.

I don't know the details, but Democrats didn't think Nixon was going far enough, so they didn't cut a deal. They thought they would get a better chance soon, but here we are, 35 years later, with much worse problems in our health care system.

I read that this failure to seize the opportunity to cut a deal with the loathed Richard Nixon has haunted Ted Kennedy, and that's why he is more of a deal-cutter than some of us young folks would like.

Anyone else heard anything like this?

It is easy.  I think a lot of people didn't like this bill on the left.  We saw the Duncan Hunter types engage in a circular firing squad.  Why should we get involved in that?  If you have not noticed, immigration is killing Bush in his approvals now, not Iraq.  Their base hated this bill.  Truth be told, I didn't think this bill is a good idea either.  It basically gave no protection to low wage workers.  Why do you think big business was so gung ho about this bill?  Hell, even HoJo introduced an amendment trying to fuck workers over even further then the original bill did.  While something needs to be done about the 12 million already here, what was stopping this bill from becoming a repeat of 1986?  That is where it was going.  One last thing as regards this bill, even Colbert mocked the damn thing.  I think he said it was 4,000 pages long.  It was a complete mess of a bill.

If you want MyDD to be more diverse, perhaps you should blog about issues that matter to people of color.

The Dems are desperately trying to avoid the issue, because if they start looking at it, they will notice to their discomfort that the primary victims of illegal immigration are Blacks.  And if they study further, they might come to realize that their own immigrant ancestors finally knew they had "made it" when they were able to take jobs away from Blacks, and in doing so keep Blacks "in their place".

Not a comforting prospect for those seeking the moral high ground on the issue by portraying the other side as racists.

With the "elites".  Obviously immigrants are helpful for providing low wages for business.

But for the most part these big-business types generally have liberal views on personnel issues, they just think they're above the law, so whatever knuckle dragging social crap people come up with won't apply to them.

So I think they're really just embarrassed and offended about this nativist crap the same way we are.  

Remember, Jeb Bush's wife is Hispanic, and some of his nephews are as well. Rove really thought that the Hispanic population would embrace social-values conservatism, and he had a shot if it wasn't for the relativists.

Their dreams of a permanent republican majority were planted in the soil of Hispanics, and those dreams have crumbled into dust.

My gut says that this is going to require linking immigration and trade, since this is an issue having to do with labor, capital, and goods all flowing across borders.  Our current immigration 'problems' (or opportunities, depending on whether you a big business guy who likes slave labor) cannot be disassociated from NAFTA, and I'm curious why that attempt was made.

exactly right. i'd love to see more public discussion of NAFTA to examine how it's been bad for workers in mexico as well as in the usa.

but we can't expect the party to take this on when D leadership was  required to pass NAFTA in the first place.

Matt has done a great service to us in getting this on the table.  The fundamental issues:

1.  how does immigration interplay with our economic policies?

2.  how has "immigrant" become a dirty word and how do we take the bullet away from Lou Dobbs and company?

3.  how do online progressives engage the "immigrants rights" movement and vice versa?

http://DreamsAcrossAmericaonline.org is a start at Matt's general point about the left and immigration, namely to build bridges between the online and traditional communities.  We are boarding a train to DC, literally and virtually, with 100 dreamers whose stories are the American story.

As we meet them, we see clearly that the perverse system in which we live, which does not much affect most of those who blog here, destroys families even as it offers clouded hope.  

"immigrant" became a dirty word when people on the left (right?) kept conflating it with "illegal".  You know, the Sadam = 911 strategy.  Immigrant rights movement?  The good ol' they vs. we tactic.  Is Rove helping us to organize?  Would explain why we keep shooting ourselves in the foot. Congress isn't enjoying an approval rating much higher than Bush.  Could it be caving in on funding for the war,  Obey increasing money for abstinence only programs, Rangel negotiating secret trade deals, Kennedy pushing guest workers and increases in H-1B visas, and HRC hiring anti-labor consultants?  Hmm, I wonder. Now, lets conflate all of that into anyone who opposes illegal immigration hates immigrants and brown people.

You are correct when you say "Big business wants cheap labor, and the cheapest labor is composed of undocumented immigrants who have no labor or legal rights, and thus no leverage."

Why then, would big business want immigration reform that has a path to citizenship and legal status for workers?  That would only make it easier for them to organize, demand fair pay, compliance with OSHA standards, etc. etc.

One possibility is that business really doesn't want immigration reform.  (If I had all the time in the world, I'd be looking up who are Tancredo and Hunter's donors.)  But there is plenty of evidence that they do, at least some business.

I think business wants immigration reform not because of "cheap labor" but as a market.  Undocumented immigrants are likely to send money back to the home country, not buy homes and spend it here.  It's the purchasing power.  For business as well as for progressives, legalizing the 10 million or whatever current undocumented is a much bigger piece than 200,000 or 400,000 guest workers (that piece is just your basic sop to Big Agriculture).

Unfortunately the debate on the left has ignored this in favor of falling into two stereotypes:  the evil boss who wants only to shaft the employees, and the docile Latino who works hard and does not talk back.

The truth is that like anyone else, Latino employees will stand up when empowered.  The dilemma for the right is that the empowerment to become full American consumers also gives them power to stand up for their rights.

Illegal immigration is bad, but those 12 million illegal immigrants that are already in should be legalized.Simple.

Mass deportation won't work.Rounding up a bunch of Mexicans is not the way to go.

and the left just didn't really play

While I don't really mind this so much-- why should the Democrats get bogged down refereeing a civil war within the Republican party?-- it is kind of weird that, despite having read more on the subject than I suspect most people had, by the time last week's version of the immigration bill came near a vote I literally had no idea if the Democrats were for or against the bill.

Come to think of it, I couldn't even really tell if immigrant's rights groups were for or against the bill. They've been awfully quiet these last few weeks, compared to how they were at this time last year.

The only person I heard actually break through to the media to express an opinion on the failed immigration bill from the perspective of someone advocating for immigrants (or even recognizing appreciably the idea that immigrants have any relevant concerns at all) was Bill Richardson, and his complaints that I saw were (while otherwise good analysis) somewhat vague, offering specific criticisms of the bill that rendered it unacceptable to him (breaks up families etc) but not actually communicating what a good immigration bill from his perspective would look like.

It does seem, interestingly, that now that the Republicans have collapsed in on themselves, that the immigrant's rights groups are finally coming out of the woodwork to start communicating what it is they want out of a hypothetical immigration bill this year; I've seen campaigns by pro-immigrant groups crop up in a couple places in the last week. What the campaigns are communicating is so far quite general ("immigrants should be treated like people", seems to be the gist of it) but not general in the sense of being vague so much as just basic and important.

I'm beginning to wonder if the Democrats are going to ever start actually forming a position on immigration. Maybe at some point it would be a good idea to do so. I realize the reasons why the Democrats are remaining so politically agnostic on the issue. But it kind of occurs to me that if the Democrats keep hiding from this issue while giggling at how much damage the Republicans are doing to themselves over it, there could be unintended consequences. For example if the Democrats don't choose a spokesperson on immigration, someone may at some point wind up inadvertantly just kind of grabbing the position of spokesperson for the Democrats on this issue in the public mind. And that person may be someone undesirable for that position, like Lou Dobbs or something...

Personally, I think the more thoughtful people on the left intuit that the whole "immigration issue" is a symptom of wider economic issues, and therefore futile to address as an isolated problem.  Sadly, this does leave space for the corporatists and the nativists to dominate the debate, but I don't think there's any reason to jump into such thrashing about.

Just watching the fight reveals a whole lotta ugly.

The left needs to show up on this one, and the immigrant groups haven't been in the fight with moral arguments that we can understand and get behind

May I ask what would be an acceptable moral argument that you could "get behind"?  Also, which immigrant rights organizations have you interacted directly with?  Perhaps you will understand where they are coming from if you attend a forum or event and listen to what they have to say.  I know here in Tucson, we have several of our City Council Members, County Supervisors and Congressman Grijalva who understand very clearly what we are advocating for and why.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/ 1222-04.htm

"Mittal cites as an example the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) signed in 1992 by the United States, Canada, and Mexico. "Instead of Mexico being able to export its food to the United States, what's really happened is that U.S. corn exports to Mexico have tripled, pushing 2 million Mexican corn farmers out of business. And those are the very people who then migrate [to the United States]."

Those migrants then work for low wages inside the United States, Mittal argues, pushing wages for all workers down."

Immigration Flood Unleashed by NAFTA's Disastrous Impact on Mexican Economy

"Falling industrial wages, peasants forced off the land, small businesses liquidated, growing poverty: these are direct consequences of NAFTA. This harsh suffering explains why so many desperate Mexicans -- lured to the border area in the false hope that they could find dignity in the US-owned maquiladoras -- are willing to risk their lives to cross the border to provide for their families. There were 2.5 million Mexican illegals in 1995; 8 million have crossed the border since then. In 2005, some 400 desperate Mexicans died trying to enter the US.

NAFTA failed to curb illegal immigration precisely because it was never designed as a genuine development program crafted to promote rising living standards, health care, environmental cleanup, and worker rights in Mexico. The wholesale surge of Mexicans across the border dramatically illustrates that NAFTA was no attempt at a broad uplift of living conditions and democracy in Mexico, but a formula for government-sanctioned corporate plunder benefiting elites on both sides of the border."

offers progressive solutions. And non solutions:

"The underlying concept: the entire reason for trade is to provide improved lives across borders, not to exploit the cheapest labor and weakest environmental rules. We need to question the widely-held assumption that what benefits American corporations benefits Mexican workers and American workers. An authentic plan for growth and development isn't about further enriching Wall Street, major corporations, and a handful of Mexican billionaires; it is about the creation of family-supporting jobs. It is also about a healthy environment, healthy workers, good education, and ordinary people being able to achieve their dreams.

The massive tide of illegal immigration from Mexico is merely one symptom of an economic arrangement where human needs -- not maximum profits-- are not the ultimate goal but a subject of neglect. Neither a massive, shameful barrier at the border nor a disposable guest-worker program will address the problems ignited by NAFTA.

Programs providing stable, decent employment, modern transportation, clean water, and environmental cleanup are needed to take the place of the immense NAFTA failure and allow Mexicans to live decent, hopeful lives in their native land. But such an effort is imaginable only if the aim is truly mutual uplift for all citizens in both nations, instead of the NAFTA-fueled race to the bottom."