There was a nice piece in this morning's WSJ about The Statue of Liberty. I had seen a show on it on the Discovery Channel a few years back, so nothing in the article was a big surprise to me, but there's a lot that's worth knowing or at least thinking about on a sunny Saturday in Manhattan Beach:

1. French sculptor Frederic Bartholdi wanted to give the US a nice statue to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the United States of America. No government funds were raised, but the French people came through with the $400K necessary to create the statue.

2. Just the arm was exhibited first in Philadelphia in 1876 for the centennial celebration, and then for several years in New York's Madison Square, as the US failed to raise the $250K needed for the pedestal. Joseph Pulitzer put the squeeze on people through an editorial campaign in his newspaper and finally folks in the US came through with the money for the base. The rest of the statue was then shipped from France in 214 massive crates.

3. The pedestal was finally completed in 1886 and the statue was dedicated on October 28, 1886.

4. And a footnote: Bartholdi was doing cutting-edge work with the hollow statue and needed a very strong internal iron superstructure. He found a young French engineer named Gustave Eiffel who was up to the task. Perhaps you have heard of Eiffel? It's interesting how Bertholdi's name is mostly lost to the sands of time, but Eiffel is still known by hundreds of millions if not billions of people. Of course, the Statue of Liberty just would not have the same ring if it was named "Bertholdi's Lady with a Torch" or something like that.

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Speaking of liberty, I gained some new insight on immigration issues during some of my latest trips to Mexico. I was meeting with a new potential partner (okay, I can't help a name-drop: his great-grandfather was a president of Mexico, and a widely respected one at that...there are streets and such named for his great-grandfather all over Mexico, and he has a somewhat unusual last name). Helps with speeding tickets and such.

Anyway, this gentleman was telling me the latest immigration ploy that is slowly spreading among folks looking to come to the US illegally from Mexico. I thought about not writing this; don't want to give anyone ideas, but then I decided to go ahead since I am fairly certain that most the folks who are trying to sneak into the US are not readers of this thread. And generally, I think it's best to spread the word about these things so that the US can take corrective action if necessary.

Here's the deal: Many, many Mexican immigrants pay absurd sums to smugglers to bring them into the US. Fees can range from $3,000 to $15,000. And since those being smuggled often only have a down payment, they work for years to pay off the debt. The smugglers are often among the lowest forms of humanity...they stack their human cargo in sub-human conditions in trucks and boats and such, and some of the human cargo suffers slow, painful deaths.

Years ago, when I was green and naive (or perhaps just less green and less naive than I am now) I didn't understand why people risking all to cross the border did not just say they were coming to Disneyland, (or even just to visit relatives), and then disappear into the woodwork of US society. Of course, it's not that easy: Everyone coming from Mexico to the US legally needs a visa, and the only way to get one is to prove to the US authorities that you are not a risk to stay permanently in the US. In other words, unless you have a specific reason like attending a university here for fixed period of time, you basically need proof a very good-paying job in Mexico, and often, the US authorities even want to see documentation that you own a house in Mexico, etc. We even have young Mexican attys who cannot get into the US for a meeting with us.

However, no Mexican needs a visa to enter Canada. Anyone with a plane ticket can go from Mexico to Canada, including those who say they are going for a hiking vacation...and somehow hike right on in to America across a US-Canadian border that is lightly patrolled and 100X more porous than the US-Mexico border.

So, the choice is simple for those who know the options: Many thousands of dollars to a smuggler and potential death by heat and thirst in desert of Arizona or New Mexico, or a nice air-conditioned flight to Canada and a vastly easier hike into the US, despite some danger and some risk of being caught. And the hike is especially nice during the summer.

Remind me again why we are building a multi-billion dollar wall at the US-Mexico border...while people will start to realize by the thousands that they can simply fly over it, non-stop to Canada, and then sneak into the US across an easy border. Those billions would be so much better spent on things like alternative energy R&D. Schools. Roads. You name it...almost anything will give us more bang for buck than that wall. But demagogues and scaremongers carry the day in Washington; there is nothing new under the sun. Except perhaps a few immigrants today who are on a nice air-conditioned flight to Canada.

A solution: We need a guest worker program...many, many of these folks don't want to live here; they just want to do seasonal work to feed their families, and then go home. But they don't go home because it's so hard to go back and forth. A guest worker program is not a panacea, but it's a common-sense start.