Merry Christmas 2008! Another sad chapter in greedy American history along the Mexican border

Avoiding The New York Times excellent profile today on poet Jack Spicer and loneliness, news arises this Christmas season that Mexicans are coming to the rescue of Americans and our depressed economy by crossing the border in record numbers with cash in their hands and buying in their hearts.

Where is Lou Dobbs' outrage when you need it? Lou is on holiday vacation filling his face with goodies harvested and/or manufactured by undocumented human beings. The guy just doesn't get it ... on purpose to make a profit and name for himself. Scrooge has some stiff competition but not his own show on CNN.

Here is what The Times reports today:

TUCSON — Mexican shoppers with fists full of cash and long Christmas lists are pouring across the border into hotels, restaurants and shopping malls here, providing an economic boost in a downward spiraling economy.

A clerk at a J. C. Penney store in Tucson rang up a purchase for Cecilia Rivera, left, on a shopping trip from Hermosillo, Mexico. Tucson’s economy depends on shoppers from south of the border.

The families, mostly middle- and upper-income, are traveling hundreds of miles to take advantage of a much wider selection of products at substantially lower prices than can be found in their hometowns in the Mexican states of Sonora and Sinaloa — even after the recent 30 percent devaluation of the Mexican peso against the dollar.

For many, it is a long journey by car that includes multiple searches at Mexican police roadblocks, followed by a huge traffic jam at the border crossing in Nogales, where delays of two hours or longer to enter the United States are common. But even with the exasperation, Mexican shoppers said it was still worth making the trip.

“We can find everything we want and it’s much cheaper,” said Aurelia Peralta, a 38-year-old homemaker from Hermosillo, a city of 700,000 about 200 miles south of Tucson. Pointing to the Guitar Hero World Tour display model her teenage son was playing, she said popular Christmas gifts cost twice as much in Hermosillo.

Mexicans have always boosted this nation's economy throughout all its history. And when people who look like me did not help enough, lands of great wealth were stolen in unjust wars that even Abraham Lincoln opposed. But Dobbs won't tell you that or a lot of other stuff about how much this nation has taken from Mexicans over the centuries and how much this nation depends on them now.

This Christmas season is just another sad chapter for a nation filled with people such as Dobbs in deep, damning denial. God help them, and Baby Jesus save them.