Monday, August 02, 2010

Read

I forgot to mention William Finnegan's fabulous comment on illegal immigration in the July 26 New Yorker, which points out some really crucial things, like, oh, in this paragraph:
In fact those numbers are surprising: they are sharply down, according to the Border Patrol—by more than sixty per cent since 2000, to five hundred and fifty thousand apprehensions last year, the lowest figure in thirty-five years. Illegal immigration, although hard to measure, has clearly been declining. The southern border, far from being "unsecured," is in
better shape than it has been for years—better managed and less porous. It has been the beneficiary of security-budget increases since September 11th, which have helped slow the pace of illegal entries, if not as dramatically as the economic crash did. Violent crime, though rising in Mexico, has fallen this side of the border: in Southwestern border counties it has dropped more than thirty per cent in the past two decades. It's down in Senator McCain's Arizona. According to F.B.I. statistics, the four safest big cities in the United States—San Diego, Phoenix, El Paso, and Austin—are all in border states.
Here's a question, though: why does the URL contain the words "taco talk"?

1 comments:

Polusplagchnos said...

All of the Talk of the Town Comment articles have that in the URL; I think it stands for talk-comment:

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2010/08/09/100809taco_talk_davidson

The other Talk of the Town pieces that are not commentary (at least, not classified that way) are just ta_talk. It looks as thought The New Yorker does their site URLs by that scheme: xx_xxyyzz.

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2010/05/24/100524ta_talk_surowiecki
http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2010/08/02/100802sh_shouts_wayne
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/09/100809fa_fact_packer