To listen to John McCain's pleas for more "guest workers," expansion of "free trade" programs that inequitably pit foreigners against Americans and amnesty for illegal aliens already in the U.S. and those still arriving daily, you would get the impression our country desperately needs help from the outside world just to meet its most basic needs.

Where is the evidence to support this assertion?

Why is it that America is suddenly unable to compete with the developing world?

What does that mean?

Why are we willing to suspend out disbelief in and commitment to the law of supply and demand?

Is this a sustainable path for the future?

How long will America need to follow this formula before the right number of workers are found?

Or is it a perpetual cycle that never ends?

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Why is no one asking these most basic economics and moral questions of the presidential candidate who admits he knows nothing of economics and seems unconcerned with the moral dimensions of most policy issues?

McCain did say we need a humane approach that treats illegal aliens as "God's children."

Let's start there, because I can agree with that statement, and I suspect most Americans can. But what does that mean? How can we treat illegal aliens like "God's children"?

Do we do that by uprooting them from their ancestral homelands by the tens of millions in one of the most massive and chaotic population transfers in the history of the world?

Do we treat foreigners like "God's children" when we create a system that strips foreign fathers from their families – temporarily or permanently?

This is exactly what we have done with the kinds of policies McCain advocates.

McCain supported the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993 and helped sell it to the American people partly as a solution to illegal immigration. NAFTA was supposed to help the Mexican economy grow, keep Mexicans in Mexico and create prosperity and jobs for people already flooding into America for survival.

Fifteen years later, we can see NAFTA only exacerbated economic problems for Mexico – creating even greater divides between the very rich and the very poor in that corrupt, socialist country.

How did NAFTA do that? Why did it lead to an even greater flood of illegal immigration than ever before?

Imagine you were a Mexican farmer eking out a living on a relatively small plot of land prior to NAFTA. To begin with, you live in a country in which the government does not protect the property rights of its citizens – one of the most basic building blocks of a prosperous economy and a free-enterprise system that can support its population. On top of that, the economy of your country is driven by illegal drug sales. It is the No. 1 industry – ahead of legitimate agriculture, tourism and even oil, which is nationalized in Mexico. Law enforcement is spotty to say the least. Cops and local officials routinely take bribes.

Into this grim scenario, one that already tries the heart and souls of Mexican farmers trying to make the most of their land without raising drug crops, comes NAFTA in 1993, which permits American agribusiness concerns like Archer-Daniels Midland Corp., with its high-tech farming techniques and virtually unlimited capital, to compete head to head with the Mexican family farmer working his little plot.

Who do you suppose will be able to raise crops more efficiently and cheaply?

That's right. Archer-Daniels Midland and the American agribusiness concerns can raise tomatoes for a much lower price – and probably higher quality, too.

So who is going to buy the produce raised by the Mexican farmer – now that U.S. agribusiness has open entrée to the Mexican market?

No one.

What do you, that Mexican farmer, do next?

You leave your family and your farm, the only culture you have ever known, and travel to America to work for U.S. agribusiness. You are hardly alone. Millions of your fellow Mexican farmers do the same. They have little choice.

McCain's policies, therefore, are inhumane. Mexicans are not being treated like "God's children" with these policies of exploitation. They are being treated like serfs – like modern-day slaves. They are means to an end – and the end is higher profits for businesses that don't deserve the name "American."

And you know where these policies ultimately lead – if you read the work of WND staff writer and author Jerome Corsi. They lead to regional government and global governance institutions. They lead away from constitutional government and independence for Americans. They lead away from the rule of law and the will of the people and toward oligarchy and rule by elite.

When you hear this rhetoric that sounds compassionate, understand that it is not. Know that what you are hearing are phony rationalizations for the policies of human exploitation.

And it's not just Mexicans being exploited by these policies. Americans are victims, too.

Americans think they are getting a break when their government passes minimum-wage laws and regulatory requirements and environmental rules that "raise the quality of their lives." But when those rules don't apply to workers competing with them both inside their own country and outside through outsourcing, Americans are getting ripped off.

The issue of illegal immigration is not a matter of "us vs. them" – as people like McCain would have you believe. The divide is not between heartless protectionist, jingoistic and racist Americans and Mexicans trying to make a living. The real divide is between those privileged elite robber barons along with their political apparatchiks like McCain vs. ordinary, basically honest, hard-working people on both sides of the border who are treated like chattel.

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