Like every other significant problem in our society, the immigration issue has been simplified to the point of grotesqueness. The dueling champions are two political caricatures: Squishy Liberal Appeasement Monkey and Raging Conservative Crypto-Nazi. We've seen this dance many times, and it looks like we're gearing up for another go-round.
When you get past the distractions (race, territory and culture) the root of the immigration problem is this: there is a foreign element which impacts our system, and we have very little visibility and control of this element. That should our first concern. Since the illegal immigrant population exists ourside the legal system, we can't even conduct a proper census. Current estimates are wildly inconsistent.
The two solutions are:
A: Find and forcibly expel all of them from the country, and create a barrier to keep any more from coming in.
B: Find a way to incorporate them into the system.
It continues to surprise me that modern conservatives insist that A is the only acceptable choice. In the interests of fiscal responsibility and realism, the brute force method should be met with overwhelming skepticism. Besides the immense resources necessary to forcibly remove a chunk of the population, the impact to the economy is impossible to estimate. Cities with large immigrant populations like San Antonio and L.A. would see a significant piece of the economic landscape simply disappear.
Is it not more prudent, realistic and responsible to grant limited rights to these people, tax them and by those means regulate the industries that employ them? Strengthening our borders is fine, but fences can be cut, and walls can be scaled. If you remove the incentive to come here, the problem will resolve itself naturally. It's not citizenship, it's not amnesty, it's simply accepting the reality of the situation and no more.
Conservative polititians understand this point, I think. They probably even privately agree. They publicly disagree, not out of ignorance, but political necessity. When it comes to constituent support, you have everything to gain from "standing up for your principles" and everything to lose from pragmatism. A takeaway here is that adhering to principles is sometimes the easiest thing in the world. Depending on which guns you're sticking to, it may require no discipline or strong character at all.
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