slap, you are a gentleman, providing that fine Texas tune for my edification. Even if Johnny Tex swimming the Rio Grande to go live in Old Mexico is a little implausible...especially as I hear that you can walk across the Rio Grande in a lot of areas anyway!

Tom, Ski, slap, admittedly I come at the whole matter of the American acquisition of the former Mexican territories ("New Mexico", et al.) from a rather different perspective, and one that doesn't approve of it in the first place (here in Canada, we've historically viewed U.S. expanionism with a rather jaundiced eye, for obvious reasons, so please, don't take offence.)

That said, 150+ years of United States rule obviously matters, and no matter how many illegals come to live in the Southwest (or elsewhere), tens of millions of U.S. citizens living there are an immutable fact. Mexican nationalism, especially led by ideological elements that are mostly US citizens themselves, is going to meet American nationalism, and that ain't just goin' to go away. Politically, this issue had already passed the "possible" to deal-with phase by the 1990's, if not the 1980's. The illegal immigration bill doesn't really change a thing, substantively.

That leaves the U.S. in a serious strategic predicament that will grow more dire (and I mean to use that very word) in which it utterly lacks the political unity and will to effectively resolve the matter before it seriously destabilizes the Union, and will be left with having to resort to military, paramilitary, and like measures that have even less ability to handle the matter. What would, what could, the US Army do if a potent Mexican separatist movement gained real traction in California? Texas is one thing, but a state that has cities that pass resolutions against Marine Recruiting Stations is quite another.

The potential for things to get completely out of hand a generation or so down the line, because the political classes can't muster the guts to face the monster that they're afraid to stop tacitly feeding, may make the Recent Unpleasantness between North and South seem positively "clean", or at least civilized, by comparison to what may develop out of this.

Maybe if the US Army is able to retain the lessons that it has learned in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, it may at least be fairly well-prepared for what may lie in the future along the Mexican border.