the Immigration Act of 1924, the law that first created the concept of "illegal immigration" by cutting off all immigration from nations whose citizens were "ineligible for citizenship" -- namely, all Asians. That law was passed in a milieu of extreme xenophobia, and was ultimately a manifestation of eliminationist eugenics in American politics.

Perhaps not surprisingly, our current drug laws are built on nearly identical bones. Like the immigration laws, they were largely enacted in the same kind of milieu: predicated on defending white privilege and keeping a law-enforcement thumb on nonwhites, including immigrant Latinos:

When marijuana was popularized in the 20s and 30s in the American jazz scene, Blacks and Whites sat down as equals and smoked together. The racist anti-marijuana propaganda of the time used this crumbling of racial barriers as an example of the degradation caused by marijuana. Harry Anslinger, head of the newly formed federal narcotics division, warned middle-class leaders about Blacks and Whites dancing together in "teahouses," using blatant prejudice to sell prohibition. In 1931 New Orleans officials attributed many of the region's crimes to marijuana, which they believed was also a dangerous sexual stimulant.

During the Great Depression, the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act came into law, again using racism as its chief selling point. The same Mexicans who were vying with out of work Americans for the few agricultural jobs available, it was said, engaged in marijuana induced violence against Americans.

Certainly, the results of the War on Drugs -- and particularly its "racially disproportionate nature" -- bear a powerful resemblance to the ultimate outcome of our misbegotten and dysfunctional system of immigration laws.

Both immigration laws and drug laws needlessly criminalize millions of hard-working Americans, citizens and immigrants alike, and produce solutions that militarize our police forces and draw us nearer all the time to a police state -- Arizona's new immigration law being the most vivid recent example.

It's always more effective, in my experience, to outsmart problems with solutions instead of beating them over the head with a blunt object, which never seems to work. Americans need to wise up -- both in their never-ending "war on drugs," and in dealing with immigration. For once, a Beck analogy is not that far off the mark -- though predictably, Beck embraces the wrong side, even then.