How to win friends and influence people IV

The Mexican Congress has OK'd a bill legalizing the possession of small quantities of marijuana, ecstacy, cocaine and heroin for personal use.

President Vincente Fox has indicated that he will sign the bill- and just like that, the moral argument for immigration reform has gone by the boards. Can you say quarantine?

The implications for the war on drugs are staggering. Instantly, illegal immigration becomes a secondary concern: if the border with Mexico isn't shut down tighter than a drum, it will be the source of a deluge of illegal drugs coming into the United States from Columbia and elsewhere in South America that will make the current flow look like a trickle.

This is one not-unsympathetic observer of the plight of illegal immigrants whose position is hardening by the second. And the irony is that over and over and over- through the rhetoric about Aztlan and reconquista, to the massive demonstrations articulating those very off-putting arguments, to the emphasis on legal status for those who have entered the country as a right which is is somehow appropriate for them to demand- and now, to the passage of a law which makes virtually closing the border with Mexico an urgent law enforcement necessity for a far more serious reason- the advocates of reform have simply shot themselves in the foot with a Gatling gun.

A campaign in favor of a crackdown on illegal immigration the likes of which we have never seen, and opposed to any immigration reform at all in the foreseeable future, count not have been better conceived and executed.