I was just speaking on the phone to a Washington lawyer who wants to contribute a piece to First Things, and in the course of our rambling conversation he proposed a thesis about the current struggles over immigration. It was one of those nonce theses—proposed in a conversation just to test it out, but I thought I’d see what others think. It boils down to this: Professional women are one of the major reasons immigration control has been so hard to achieve.

If I understand the point, it means that certain classes (and generations) of women wanted to have both successful careers and successful families. And to achieve that, they needed to be able to afford servants on middle-class and upper-middle-class incomes. But the cost of legal employment in the United States is very high, and, besides, the population generally resists and resents being personal servants.

Still, when compared to third-world employers, these American women had a great deal of money to spend on gardeners, cleaners, cooks, nannies, and handymen (either directly or through piece-work firms). And over the years, with networks of illegal immigrants telling their families and friends back in their native countries, the numbers of such immigrants swelled.

The children of these immigrants, however, prove to have little more desire to be personal servants than the legal Americans do. And so the flow of new immigrants has to be kept open to provide new servants.

The claim in all this is that the construction, food-service, and farm industries are not the ones that will suffer much if illegal immigration is halted. It’s the professional women who will suffer. As voters, they overwhelmingly oppose attempts to crack down on illegal immigration, and they typically insist they do so for high moral reasons. Is it only a coincidence that the interests of their economic class demand exactly the same position?

Speaking of the Mirror of Justice blog, they’ve been having a great exchange on city planning, natural law, the New Urbanists, sprawl, and much more. The exchange started with Eduardo M. Peñalver’s op/ed in the Washington Post, and elicited comments here, here, here, here, here, and here. Now, Philip Bess, author of Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architecture, Urbanism, and the Sacred, and the Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture, has written a long response. The entire exchange is worth checking out.

(You can read the three articles Bess has written for First Things here.)

Read about it here. (hat tip: MOJ)

“I’m the spiritual offspring of Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor–or, more accurately, I’d like to be. For now, I’m just a young(ish) guy who has had a gradually deepening appreciation of his Catholic faith, and of the profound difference that faith makes.”

So says Matthew Lickona, author of Swimming with Scapulars: True Confessions of a Young Catholic. Called a “breath of fresh air,” by Publishers Weekly, this book is “thoughtfully written and happily absent of platitudes and pious moralizing.” Instead, Lickona entertains readers with his candid look at what it means to live his faith fully and vibrantly in the modern world.

Intrigued? Or just wondering: Who on earth swims with scapulars?! Catholic Radio International will be broadcasting a reading of the book, chapter by chapter, beginning today at 12 pm CST. See here for details.

Here’s a conflicted piece in this morning’s Los Angeles Times—transparently contemptuous of pro-life activism but respectful of the pain of men dealing with their complicity in abortion.