question about which the election and the bazillion think pieces about how the Democrats have truly lost all the white working class vote have made me re-think my previous answer.

Answer is, I don't know, I'm still working on it.

As a person who views history through a Marxist lens, I tend to see American history as a class struggle where racism is used to by the elites to keep poor white, black and brown people from seeing their common interest and uniting to demand change or at least a fairer share of the pie. So I tended to see border security as a manifestation of this racism and therefore something to oppose.

Lately though I am beginning to see unlimited free immigration as a source of unlimited cheap labor for the capitalist elites and therefore a tool of oppression rather than a tool of some idealized "freedom," and therefore something to oppose on behalf of not only the working class brown people who comprise most of the undocumentados, but also working class white people and black people.

And pragmatically it is an issue that clearly alienates the working class white voter, who as a part of working class needs to be and has to be part of the Democratic coalition, from that party.

Also as somebody pointed out here the other day in a great one-liner--you can have a welfare state and you can have wide open borders, but you can't have both.

So--where to go from there? To me a physical wall is an incredible expense and a wasteful one since the barrier will not be hermetic in any event; resourceful undocumentados will get over, around, or under it anyway. Maybe the answer is Increased application of technological advances already in play. A smart wall if you will, or at least a smarter wall. Maybe coupled with amnesty for those already here and a more liberal policy for wannabe new arrivals--because this situation we're in didn't occur in a vacuum, it occurred because there is a need here for more workers willing to do the kind of jobs undocumented's gravitate towards. Maybe a higher minimum wage, too, which I keep being told will reduce demand for labor in unskilled work.

But--work in progress, for this Democratic-aligned Trotskyite.

Good fucking question, though. Way to not let me skate on my previous bullshit one-liner.