Walls can’t stop a hemisphere on the move

“To placate the nativist flank of his Republican Party, President Bush has promised to brick up the sky. But that will not prevent the coming marriage of Mexico and the United States. South and north of the line, we are becoming a hemispheric people ”” truly American ”” in no small part because of illegal immigrants.

As the son of Mexican immigrants legally in the United States, I have long wondered about the future of Mexico, a nation that every night for nearly a century has lost hundreds of its most hopeful youths to its neighbor and rival, the North.

I think historians will come to recognize the illegal immigrant as the great prophetic figure within the Americas. The illegal immigrant Americanized us all by a simple and frugal migration; by sojourning in the North; and by sending the dream of the North (a money-gram) back into Mexico”

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