People want cheap goods, so they’ll go wherever the price is right, whether there are illegals working there or not.

Times change and the future gobbles up the past. In the process, there are sea changes in how business is conducted and what we will accept and what we will legislate against. For example, the 1800’s were dependent on slave labor, child labor and unmarried girls. Slavery went in the 1860’s, child labor was alive and well in the 1920’s when the orphan trains sent children to be “adopted” by farmers in the grain belt. Young women manned the switchboards, looms, typewriters, classrooms, hospital corridors, sales counters and secretary desks until the 1960’s.

Wal-Mart is not a lick different from Sears. In 1910, you could get more variety, quality and a lower price from the Sears catalog than from a month of careful shopping.

So far as Wal-mart and China is concerned, the trade deficit to China is a hoax. If China wants to “cash in” its surplus dollars, what would it do? Trash the US economy and eliminate its (China’s) holdings? Come to the US and drag six states over to China?

The namby-pamby US Department of Justice goes after Wal-Mart because it is the proverbial “500 pound gorilla.” The old adage in advertising is that if you want to shoot ducks, you go where the ducks are flying. Wal-Mart has huge exposure. If you trace the illegals in Herndon, Va. (for instance) to the job site the chances they will be indirectly involved with Wal-Mart are far greater than that they will be involved with Mr. Muffler.

Wal-Mart would be s-t-o-o-o-o-p-i-d beyond calculation to have any part of their corporate structure or profitability based on evading or obfuscating the law. That would put them in the position of having to outsmart every adversary.

Furthermore, we must not forget that Montgomery Ward tanked and Sears and Penney’s are holding on by a fingernail. Target, Sears, Penney’s, etc. are not in collusion with Wal-Mart. They are traditional market forces against Wal-Mart. If they could help bring the giant to his knees, they would do so ASAP.

If you go back to the “illegal immigrant” market in Herndon, Va., you will doubtlessly find that the vast majority of the employers of illegals are bit players who are trying to shave a contract.

I particularly agree with #17 Jan Bruner who posted: “Why single out Wal-Mart? Why not do the unexpected and go after a liberal law firm which charges such exhorbitant prices that no regular American could ever afford them, and scrutinize their cleaning services? I guarantee that the majority of businesses in the US that have contracted services will be in the same dilemma. In fact, I’d go one further and say that a high percentage of government contractors use illegals…Wal-Mart is such an easy punching bag and gets much closer scrutiny than anyone else. I say, go after some of the accusers… I wonder who cleans up the offices for the ACLU?”

A big corporation like Walmart likes illegal immigration, for several reasons:

1. Cheap labor.

2. Walmart caters primarily to the lower end of the consumer market, and that demographic has a higher percentage of immigrants, legal and otherwise. So of course Walmart likes illegals, they are their customers. (And yes, I know that middle class people shop at Walmart too, but they do that because they can, not because they have to.)

3. Most large corporations support amnesty and loose borders because they see it as a way to ingratiate themselves with Hispanic consumers.

4. A large business like Walmart has the financial resources to deal with the bilingual market that is developing. In officially bilingual Canada, businesses spend billions of dollars every year to comply with government language regulations. These sorts of regulations are a sort of a tax on business that raises operating costs, and shuts out smaller, more modestly capitalized competitors. Walmart would naturally be all in favor of anything that raises the price of entry to compete.

China holds some 600 billion dollars. In effect, they are financing about 1/8 of our national debt. That gives them leverage not only economically, but politically. They are quickly becoming a major competitor for international oil reserves and they are busily upgrading their armed forces, already fielding a two million man army.

If it isn’t so already, China will soon be our biggest foe economically, militarily, politically, morally, unless we self-destruct first. Walmart is pushing the process along at a rapid clip.

We’d better wake up. It begins and ends with education. If we don’t graduate more of our own students instead of foreign ones, students who can speak at least two languages, have some physical skills, some deductive abilities, and some willingness to earn their keep we are destined for the backwaters of history.

Of course, I could be wrong.

The documentarian Robert Greenwald made a film about Wal-Mart recently that may have attacked them for offering low-wages. But if Wal-Mart is being openly honest about their benefits, then that’s not what’s wrong with them. No, what IS wrong with Wal…

Now concerning government though, I figure the thing most likely to screw up all the freedoms and unique qualities of this country is a hardline on the ‘homeland security’ stuff, and that is most likely to happen if we find we cannot protect ourselves from internal terrorism, which is most likely to happen if our borders are sieves. So to me, a decent lockdown on the borders and increased concern about illegal aliens is a political, military and safety issue, and does need to be done. In fact I feel some surrealism when I look at the politics of this because NOT forcing this, not taking this seriously, seems like braindead suicide to me, and I can’t understand why the conservatives aren’t flipping out about it.

From a human perspective, I wish Mexico were in better shape.

I am not sure why the strong feelings about walmart’s hiring though. What am I missing?

Where I live, Super-Walmart is the closest thing to civilization. Of course, its existence killed 3 grocery stores, leaving only the tiny one across town, a few gas stations, a stationery store, and several other businesses that folded when SW took the business. They underbid any other store by far; for example, the cat food that is $6.50 in the tiny grocery near my house is about $4.20 at SW. The place is huge, they need a freakin tram to drive around the edges or something. We shop there because we have no choice. We could buy some basics at the other store and pay 10-30% more, but Super Walmart has damn near everything. Seriously. I think someday they can just open up apartments around the store for employees, build a playground, and it’ll be Wally World for real.

The illegals will be deported, but will any of the companies that hired them be held accountable?

That’s the real question, the “we’re deporting them” is smoke and mirrors.

There was just an incident on the border where some Mexicans in army uniforms felt free to face down our BP people and haul a truck filled with pot out of the Rio Grande.

Bush has left our border open to terrorists, drug smugglers, and other criminals.