Cheap Donuts and a Mess of a Job

David Corn:

George Bush went to a Dunkin' Donuts on Wednesday. No, this wasn't a Bill Clinton moment. The president was making a political point-about immigration. The two Iranian Americans who own this donut shop in Alexandria, Virginia, apparently cannot find the workers they need to keep churning out those circular sugar bombs. So, Bush said, Congress has to pass legislation that will allow illegal immigrants to become legal guest-workers.

Congress does need to deal with immigration. But there might be another solution to the Dunkin' Donuts problem--raising the minimum wage. If work at fast-food shops paid more, there would be more fast-food workers. Isn't that how the market works?

Bush's plan, though, is based on exploiting the low wages of Mexico. That is, let's bring in more low-wage workers who don't expect to make a living wage here and whom we don't have to treat as citizens. Use them and send them back.

We get the donuts. They get the hole. Now, it's not actually a hole. It's a better deal than they can get in Mexico--which is why they come here. So the long-term solution to the immigration mess is to close the wage gap between the United States and Mexico. And I don't mean bringing down wages in the United States. Yet the apparent election in Mexico of Felipe Calderon, a booster of NAFTA, is not likely to lead to policies in Mexico that produce higher wages. As long as Mexico has low wages, Americans will have to fend off waves of Mexicans trying to cross the border--but at least that keeps the price of donuts down.

Here Are the Keys to the Car I Drove off the Road. Hillary Clinton, John McCain--be careful what you wish for. There was an interesting quote in yesterday's Washington Post from Richard Haass, who once was a senior official in Bush's State Department and who now heads the Council on Foreign Relations. He told the paper, "I am hard-pressed to think of any other moment in modern ties where there have been so many challenges facing his country simultaneously. The danger is that Mr. Bush will have over a White House to a successor that will face a far messier world, with far fewer resources left to cope with it."

In CFR-speak, that's a damning indictment. A big part of that messier world, of course is Iraq and Afghanistan--and Bush bears responsibility for each of those messes. He may not be able to do much about missiles over North Korea, Iranian defiance regarding its nuclear program, mayhem in Somalia, the increasing tensions between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and the electoral logjam in Mexico--though his policies on most of these fronts have not improved matters. Yet he has botched the two big projects he took on--Iraq and Afghanistan. And, as Haass noted, he has squandered resources--particularly with his war in Iraq, which has claimed hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer dollars, thousands of lives (Americans and Iraqis) and the global goodwill toward the United States that existed after 9/11. (On top of that, Bush has run up the national debt in a manner that would make a drunken sailor blush.)

So his successor--be he or she D or R--will confront problems exacerbated by Bush and will find it harder to marshal the resources needed to deal with these challenges. And this scenario doesn't even cover global warming. It makes you wonder why anyone would even want the job after Bush is done with it.