guitars and amps last night with JM, that was fun. He brought over his new Les Paul and I must say, it is RED! Way red. Pretty guitar and clean as a whistle, as Pop would say. Decided I really like the Strat/Princeton Reverb combination. Sweet.
The Dude posted a link on oil imports over at LST yesterday that got me to thinking about the immigration issue. Yeah, I know, what the heck does oil have to do with immigration? Which, I think was his point, that it does have to do with it. Mexico is our 2nd largest supplier of imported oil, sending us roughly 17% of all imported oil. Our total supply of crude is about 15.2 million barrels per day, of which about 9.8 million barrels are imported, thus Mexican oil represents roughly 11% of our daily supply. Wow, that is a lot.
So, I started thinking, what if we viewed illegal immigration in the same way. I mean, if no one is marching in our streets with a Mexican flag, I am able to put aside emotions for the most part and think about the issue. Labor is a commodity. It is bought and sold daily. Right? Okay, so how many adults are in the US? Using 2003 numbers, it is 217 million. How many adults are in the workforce? The latest report from the BLS of 1/5/07 says 153 million, with 7 million unemployed. Okay, NPR estimates (they’re on the left, probably lower than most estimates) that there are between 11 and 12 million here today. My guess is that 70% or more work (kids, stay at home mom’s not working), calculates to about 8 million workers. Just about the offset of our unemployment. Meaningless but interesting nonetheless.
What is interesting is that it opened my eyes a bit to the extent of the effect upon our economy (which, BTW, was probably The Dude’s intent). The commodity of illegal labor is 5% of our total workforce at a minimum. Can you imagine if we just shut off 5% of our oil? There would be mutiny. I suspect this is what is happening with the debate, people smarter than me are able to take the emotion out and look it it similarly.
Oh, and I have a new flag mount for the Marauder. Cool, eh?
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