Sunburnt and exhausted, I return from the biggest rally for immigrant rights in the history of Los Angeles. Five hundred thousand mostly Latino, mostly young, and mostly protest-babe-caliber people marched in the streets of This Proud Capital Of The Third World to demand a halt to various immigration control measures in Congress – like building a wall and making it a felony to help illegal immigrants – and, more importantly, to plead for opportunities for advancement and citizenship. There has never been anything like it.

This is a seismic shift in the political landscape of the U.S.A

How very unlike France, whose embittered immigrants just want to wreck things, or whose frightened, distrustful students just want to preserve their privileges! Here we have something incredibly different, the crie de coeur of the people who share our society, just pleading for a right to inclusion. So that they can get better jobs, so that they can get house mortgages, so that they can freely travel to see their relatives in Mexico, so that they can avail themselves of all the privileges and responsibilities of U.S. citizenship – and I am not kidding, they were pleading for citizenship – and transform this country with a new dynamic wave of their own contributions, too.

The U.S. currently only has visas for 10,000 low-skilled workers from countries like Mexico. It’ll takes more high-skilled workers, but even those numbers aren’t enough. The U.S. clearly has need for 12 million workers, because that’s the number who’s here illegally right now. 12,000,000! And the U.S. only hands out visas for 10,000! And make no mistake, we’ve got a 4.7% unemployment rate, we definitely need the help.

We are living in the most dynamic society in human history and we aren’t even getting the people we need! More and more, visitors here notice labor shortages all over the place – at the rentacar, at the phone service lines, everywhere. We are this closed fortress and yet our own history shows that we have this amazing ability to integrate immigrants no matter where they come from! We take the dregs of other societies and convert them into the world’s most dynamic, successful people! It’s called FREEDOM!

Who are these people? Look around. After the rally, I headed down to Orange County … and noticed that everyone is Latino. They’re young, they’ve got money, they’ve got lots of little kids around them, they are the future of Orange County and the bellwether of the U.S.

Look at America!!!!!!!!!!!!

Back in LA, the tone of the march was not anti-American, not by a long shot. I did not get the feeling many of those marchers really truly hated America. On the contrary, I thought they liked it. All they wanted was a chance to be American.

It’s a complicated issue. How do we give people like this legalization without penalizing the people who have been waiting in line legally, often for years? How do we ensure fairness?

But on the other hand, how do we ignore this?

The great economist Hernando de Soto has pointed out that when a critical mass of illegality is achieved, like, say, squatting on public lands, the U.S. historically has politicians eventually bend to the will of the people. That’s why the 1862 Homestead Act was passed by Abraham Lincoln. This great wave of globalization and immigration is no different. It is in our interest to find some way to resolve this, to give the most dynamic people out there an opportunity, to stop treating them like they are invisible, and, even from a Republican perspective, give them economic opportunity, because historically, any time an immigrant group is allowed to buy houses, they turn into Republican voters. I don’t want to insult any good readers, but sadly, some of the GOP “base” doesn’t remember this detail at all! Cripes it’s such an opportunity!

My suggestion is: Just give them all! If we need them, then give them and us what we all need, a place in society, the right to be.

The Catholic Church is fully with the Latino people on this, and has ordered all parishoners to disobey any law that prohibits the helping of illegal immigrants. They know who their ‘base’
is – young people, young families, people who marry, people who have kids, people who believe in life – in short, Mexicans! Sadly, there are significant parts of the GOP that do not.

Spanish-language radio in Los Angeles was highly instrumental in turning out the masses of people for this rally – in fact, they were a key player – and right under gringos’ noses. Now, there are some within this movement who say this is the broad kickoff of a broad new civil rights movement. On this, I cannot say for sure, but it sure seemed like something happened.

Being a U.S. citizen is increasingly an incredible privilege and honor, and of course it should be. You get a U.S. passport, a U.S. dollar salary, general honesty in government (at least compared to just about any other place except Singapore, NZ and Scandinavia), and real freedom, the freedom to be who you want and be rewarded for it. But all these privileges shouldn’t exist in a closed, undynamic feudal fiefdom, a bell jar, just because the rest of the world is a mess. We got room here. Let in everyone our society needs. A good way know might be in looking at the role played by those immigrants who are already here. I don’t believe in static pie theories. If immigrants are here and contributing, then we do ourselves our favor by welcoming them in.

Source, all photos: Associated Press and Reuters, via Yahoo!

UPDATE: Glenn at Instapundit thinks that the rally itself could be the movement’s undoing, and lays out why it could backfire. He said he had always been sympathetic to individual immigrants but this march seemed to be working against that natural sympathy. He’s also got an excellent roundup from several good bloggers like Mickey Kaus and Virginia Postrel. Read it here.

UPDATE: Here were my thoughts from last year’s rally.

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin has an excellent roundup of posts and essays outlining the problems and difficulties with the immigration issue. It’s a must-click here.