Saturday

Votes are in. Congress has now approved legislation that might lead to a nearly seven-hundred mile fence along particularly porous and undermanned portions of the US border with México. This comes as a blow to President Vicente Fox who has struggled throughout his presidency to soften immigration laws between these two countries.* Not that this is a worse case scenario. Immigration is the current domestic cause celebré among certain Americans, and we've seen schemes bandied about that would make undocumented status in the US a felony, or give police the right to arrest foreign nationals suspected of being undocumented. One crank lawman even suggested concentration camps for nationals with illegal status. This has sparked vitriolic jingoistic debate, quasi-militant citizen borderlands-guarding, billion-dollar deals for surveillance and enforcement equipment, and the old "English is the national language" ratification that attempts to make it impossible to sing the US anthem in Spanish. In the long run, the seven hundred miles of nationalistic isolationism we are extending to our southern neighbors is by far the lesser of many evils. And the Canadian border? Well, we don't even know exactly where that is.* Border areas between the US and Canada are so badly tended that it will take Boeing millions of dollars in chainsaws and weed whackers to dig it out. Score one for Oaxacan protestors: the two-day thousand-businesses shutdown of the capital ended halfway through Friday when business reopened either a) because that little bit of money is better than nothing at all, or b) protestors called the proper numbers and threatened to burn shops that were closed. In Mexico City, the secretary of the interior today called for a halt to this "kidnapping" of central Oaxaca, and even suggested that there might be support for a referendum on Governor Ruiz.* Interesting. [Cavin]