Immigration and the reactionaries

I have been a bit perplexed by the big to-do -- on both sides -- about immigration. I don't really feel strongly about it myself, except to think that all immigrants, legal and non-, should be treated humanely, and also that I am not particularly enthusiastic about people with third-world resource consumption coming to fulfill the American dream and consume fossil fuels at a first-world level. I want fewer nonrenewables being consumed, not more.

The thing that baffled me the most was all of the American fascists' sudden rage at the Bush administration for being too lenient about immigration controls. Then somebody -- I think it was Digby -- pointed it out, and it all seemed suddenly so clear. The neocon interventionist wing of the Republican Party has failed catastrophically, and so the reactionary/racist/fascist wing of the party now needs to return to that old American fallback state, that of nativist isolation. There are no remotely cogent arguments that having illegal Mexican immigration endangers US national security.