Aiding and Abetting

Shouldn't this be illegal?

To research the best design over two years, Werthein interviewed shoe designers, migrants, aid workers, even an immigrant smuggler. She joined the Mexican government's Grupo Beta migrant-aid society on long border hikes. She heard from a Salvadoran woman in Tijuana who said she was kidnapped and raped by her smuggler.

Based on those interviews, she added a pocket - migrants told her they were often robbed. She also added the flashlight - many cross at night.

Some get lost - hence, the compass and map.

"If you get lost," she told the men at the shelter, "just go north."

In downtown San Deigo, a boutique called Blends displays the shoes on a black pedestal. Werthein says Blends and Printed Matter, a store in Manhattan, have sold about 350 pair.

"I wouldn't wear them and I wouldn't want my husband to wear them," said Blends browser Antonieta LaRussa, 28. "But the cause is awesome. There's so much opposition to immigration. She's looking at it from the other side of the fence and asking why."

That last paragraph did it for me. It's just too perfect. Simultaneous liberal outrage and advocacy. Brilliant. I couldn't have written it better myself.

And, for the record: Virtually no one in America is anti-immigration. I am not anti-immigration or anti-immigrant. I am very much anti-illegal immigration.

Werthein should be jailed for aiding criminals at the border. Seriously. The next time she gives a border hopper a pair of shoes, isn't she responsible for that persons actions when they do something like this? Or this? Or this? This? This? Where does it end?

Throw her ass in jail with a designer jumper that offers other inmates easy access to the crotch area, secret pockets for money and cigarettes, and a shiv sheath built onto the arm. Across the front and back should read "___ is ___'s bitch." Then we'll see how she likes the guards acting complicit in her frequent and continuous role. Amounts to about the same thing.

Thnx to Ravenwood

More

I love the smell of irony in the morning. Now that her shoes have been online and on the news, the coyotes will know where to llok when they rob them. The border patrol will know who, in a carload of people, just walked across the border when they're wearing a $200 pair of sneaks but can't speak english. Sometimes...