I write essays to myself in a struggle to see what I really think about a subject in the news. Those subjects have included significant local happenings, or some inspirational event, or some extraordinarily colorful congressman's unique way of betraying the public trust, or some senator trying, like a lady of the night, to justify political prostitution with the senatorial equivalent of "a girl has got to make a living?" One has written more than 500 hundred such mental exercises in the past three years, and some of them, about 150, have appeared here as columns.

Now comes this business of how to seriously decrease the massive illegal immigration of Mexicans, and "illegals"from more than 82 other countries, into the United States? The ideas that immediately come to mind seem too simple, and much too practical to ever be considered: 1. Make employers document the legal status of each of their employees. Make the fines for employers significantly tough; 2. Require a national identity card for all of us.

One realizes that making employers seriously responsible for documentation would cause heavy contributors to both major political factions, Democrat and Republican, to become enraged. Cheap labor and the lusts for new left wing voters, in the millions, are really what's at stake here. Mexicans without "Green Cards" are exploited every day of their lives with the threat of being exposed. It's the new serfdom. The new "slave traders" are well-organized Mexican-exploiter-exporters who are apparently often in cahoots with the worst elements of both the American right and left. Sadly, their victims are the decently motivated Mexican "illegals" who work hard for pitiful pay, well below a minimum wage, for the easiest of reasons to understand. They are decent people, who do an honest day's work to feed their families.

The second suggestion: reduce illegal immigration by requiring a (very difficult to counterfeit) "national identity"card for each person in this country will cause many of you to become immediately outraged with such a "dangerous" idea. However, we Americans already have a "national identity"number. Soon after birth, each baby in the United States becomes the owner of an official "identity" card. It's called the Social Security Card, and it is easily forged, faked and fabricated. The Social Security Card was never meant to be an identity card, but it has become just that. Think about how many times we're "required" to use our Social Security number for identification "verification only?" You may call a pig a rose, but it will still stink. You may say the Social Security card is not an identity card, but it doesn't change the fact that it is, by the nature of its most common usage, a "National I. D." card, and one that is easily counterfeited thousands of times a day here, and throughout the world. In today's computer world, a cosmos created by combining numbers into "programs," the Social Security number has virtually become our "name."

We need to be aware, as potential victims of developing political grandstanding, from the right and the left, that there is nothing to fear from an official, counterfeit protected, National Identity Card. But, big city machine-politicians hate the National Identity Card proposal, perhaps because it would make stealing elections at a lot more difficult, if not impossible?

One now turns to the investigation of unstated reasons why so many so-called "progressive" intellectuals, political activists, and left-liberal Democrats seem to want amnesty (pardons) for illegal immigrants. (Remember whenever the word "progressive"is used in politics, it really means "socialist.")

Left-wingers think that the pardoned "illegals" will vote Left Social Democrat? And, for a little balance, Republican Senator John McCain knows that if he doesn't indulge many of his Arizona backers with continuing cheap labor, he won't stand a chance at gaining the presidential nomination. It's a sorry sight, the usually balanced Senator John McCain cosponsoring an "amnesty" bill with the embarrassingly asymmetric [that means unbalanced or crooked, boys kk] senator from Massachusetts, Senator Ted Kennedy.

Left wing "progressives" have the idea that if millions of Mexicans were made eligible to vote, politics in this nation would move spectacularly to the left. Why? First, they assume that many already legally qualified to vote Mexicans don't vote because they are "overwhelmed" by registrations requirements. And, second they believe that those millions of Mexicans, and other minorities, would automatically become left wing voters. The leftist Socialist Democrats (those who are wrecking the real Democrat Party) believe that if they could "get more poor people out to vote," they would vote "socialist" for them.

Let's take a look at the results of making voting easier for the masses, and the result of massive GOTV (get out the vote) campaigns in 2004. Nader got less than one-half of 1 percent of the votes in 2004, Al Sharpton and Dennis Kucinich contested the nomination from the left and together they got about five million votes from coast to coast. And, even though Kerry had the easy pickup of many of Nader's voter's from back in 2000, many of the new voters (GOTV voters) voted Republican. Bush won more new votes than Kerry in Virginia and Pennsylvania, half again as many as Kerry won in Florida, nearly twice as many as Kerry added in Missouri, and more than three times as many as Kerry added in West Virginia. By the way, the left wing needs to remember, if they have hopes way down the road for the Mexican vote, that as Mexican, and Americans in general, have become more educated and middle-class, they tend to NOT vote. The U. S. Census Bureau data suggest that up to 30 million "nonvoters" in 2004 had either some college education, a bachelor's degree, or an even more advanced degree.

Returning to the Mexicans, those whom I have observed in Southeast Missouri and Northeast Arkansas, are God fearing practicing Christians, are generally married (a Sacrament in their religion) before they have children, work for a living, don't have a "tradition" of generations living on welfare, and are productive good citizens. They will surely have a steady rise into the middle class, and they will most likely vote for candidates who share the solid values of most family oriented, and Godfearing, working middle class Americans.

There are conservative "poor" people. Socialists hate that fact, because it goes against the grain of Left Social Democrat "wise men," who have always maintained that there are millions who don't vote because the registration process is too "complicated and too intimidating." Yet, those same folks somehow have managed, for many years, to successfully get credit cards, enroll their kids in school, get student loans, borrow money, and get subsidies to buy a house through a federal agency, make job applications, and to have signed rental contracts for Cable TV, and acquired cell phones and pagers, all of which are a lot harder to do than registering to vote.

The Left Social Democrats, mainly in our large city ghettos, have always strived to keep "their," as they see them, people race-baited and propagandized. However, there are millions of Americans risen up from a hushed "polite"discrimination of low expectations to a people who have nevertheless steadily risen from slavery and Jim Crow, and the likes of Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton, to the middle class and above, despite the combined efforts of Left Social Democrats and self-appointed racist political "overseers."

Politics, for the sake of winning elections, seldom give us real reform. Reform, transformation for the better, comes from the people most affected.

Kenneth Kinchen is an independent writer with a background in international business and foreign service contracting.