THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

As this report from the AP illustrates.

When Pedro Lopez Vazquez crossed illegally into the United States last week, he was not heading north to look for a job. He already had one.

His future employer even paid $1,000 for a smuggler to help Vazquez make his way from the central Mexican city of Puebla to Aspen, Colo.

''We're going to Colorado to work in carpentry because we have a friend who was going to give us a job,'' Vazquez said.

Vazquez, 41, was interviewed along the Arizona border after being deported twice by the U.S. Border Patrol. He said he would keep trying until he got to Aspen.

His story is not unusual. A growing number of U.S. employers and migrants are tapping into an underground employment network that matches one with the other, often before the migrants leave home.

''It continues to become clear who controls immigration: It's not governments, but rather the market,'' said Jorge Santibanez, director of the Tijuana-based think-tank Colegio de la Frontera Norte.

And the employers have little to worry about thanks to the Bushoviks "effective" Homeland Security measures.

To make a real dent in this network, the U.S. government would need to go after employers or make them pay the costs of legalizing workers, migration activists say.

But an August 2005 report of the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, indicates the opposite is happening. After the Sept. 11 attacks, work-site inspections by U.S. immigration officials plummeted as they focused on national security cases.

From 1999 to 2004, the number of businesses that faced fines dropped from 417 to three, the GAO said. Data after 2004 could not be compared because the government changed the way it records data.

Kinda makes you wonder why the business friendly GOP'ers are making so much noise about immigration, doesn't it? Or is cognitive dissonence a congenital Republican flaw?