I grew up in a rural area.  I remember as a young boy riding in the car with my folks and noticing with some alarm that a farmer’s cows got into his neighbors cornfield.  I asked if we were going to stop and help get them back where they belong.  There was nothing quite like an impromptu cattle round up to liven up an otherwise uneventful car ride.

Dad said not to worry because after the harvest they sometimes let the cows in the cornfield on purpose.  Why?  Because they both benefit, one farmer gets free feed while the other gets free “fertilizer”.  That also explained why I didn’t see a busted fence and just then noticed an open gate between the properties. 

If only our problem with our southern neighbor were so cut and dried.  The benefits, I am afraid, have been far from mutual, for far too long.  Illegal aliens are a drain on our social welfare, education, health care, and law enforcement systems.  The benefits supposedly mutualizing this arrangement are what, cheap produce and manicured lawns?  I’d like to see an actuarial economic analysis comparing the illegal immigrant tax burden as it relates to grocery savings.  Somehow I don’t think it would be that close, but even if it is, it doesn’t justify the societal equivalent of massive shoplifting.    
   
Accusations of bigotry, xenophobia, greed, class warfare, racism, union busting, union building, corporate welfare, regular welfare, nationalism, and isolationism will fly fast and furious in lieu of reasonable debate because immigration is second only to abortion in terms of raw emotionalism.

Regular folks, Heartlander types if you will, get it, and consider this mainly a matter of fundamental fairness.  Letting people who broke the law cut in front of those who followed the law is just plain wrong and unacceptable - - and no amount of impassioned rhetoric, or legislation, will make it otherwise.

Let’s dispatch the race issue right away.  Move along folks, no racism here.  The ones getting screwed in this deal are the ones already in line who are mostly of color. So, other than offering the left another opportunity to accuse the right of racism, this issue has nothing to do with race. 

Another ox being gored is the landscape, agricultural, and other businesses who are left at a disadvantage by following the rules.  Here again the good guys get punished while the scofflaws get rewarded.   
 
Policymakers should start by addressing the issue honestly and, please, please, please, knock off the condescending drivel about how “complex” the immigration problem is.  This conservative grinds his teeth whenever a policymaker endeavors to explain how this is such a complicated issue.  It reminds me of the above mentioned "fertilizer", specifically of the male bovine variety, unadulterated.  Anytime a politician goes to great lengths in belaboring the complexity of a problem you can bet the farm simple solutions are being actively avoided.

Granted, it is a tougher challenge for congress than usual, but not because it’s is so complicated.  The thorny nature in this challenge is that any solution requires pissing off a considerable constituency.  Political careers depend on keeping as many people as happy as possible and when a problem without a flawless solution comes along they are utterly flummoxed.  In their hearts they would really prefer to see this issue evaporate, especially before election time, but there they go, those pesky constituents, getting all uppity and expecting an actual solution to a problem they’ve successfully managed to ignore for twenty years.  The nerve!  Imagaine, the situation has gotten so out of hand regular Americans have looked up from behind their Star Enquirer and said enough already.

The Heartlander scratches his head in wonder at how we can put a man on the moon but, in this day and technological age, we can’t manage to secure a 2300 mile border.  Like so many “complex” problems, to butcher an old adage, if there's no political will, there will be no way. 

It is not a matter of closing, but of controlling the border.   Enforcing existing laws and building a fence is a way to remedy the problem of a porous border. Period.  Wall Street Journal Columnist Peggy Noonan, almost always worth a full read, lays it all out in her recent column like this:
 
"We should stop, slow down and absorb. We should sit and settle. We should do what you do after eating an eight-course meal. We should digest what we've eaten.
We should close our borders. We should do whatever it takes to close them tight and solid. Will that take the Army? Then send the Army. Does it mean building a wall? Then build a wall, but the wall must have doors, which can be opened a little or a lot down the road once we know where we are…..”

The Heartlander says either follow the law, or change it, but don’t insult my intelligence in claiming enforciement of the law is impossible when anyone with an IQ approaching room temperature knows damn well no serious effort at doing so has ever been attempted. 

Michael Barone one of, if not the, premiere political analyst working today puts it more mildly:

      “The old Immigration and Naturalization Service (now U.S. Citizenship and Services) and the understaffed Border Patrol have been among our least competent federal bureaucracies.”

Gee, ya think ?!?!?!

Barone continues...

         The advocates of this new bill must convince voters that their plan will work better. They have a decent case to make, such as their call for an identification card with biometric information. Technology has made this more feasible than it was 20 years ago, and the phobia against a national identification card has been weaker since 9/11. Advocates must now convince the critics that such a card would make sanctions against employers enforceable. They must also show that border security will improve: that the 700-mile fence mandated by Congress last fall will actually be built; that unmanned aerial vehicles will reduce illegal crossings; that the larger Border Patrol will be effective; and that the apparatus of state will prove strong enough to prevail against market forces.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/05/why_enforcement_matters.html

Where the President is concerned I find it not hard, but impossible, to accept, especially in light of his self proclaimed zealotry on national security, his insistence in not only facilitating, but institutionalizing, a porous border.  His political capital account has just gone into arrears.  

I can give him the benefit of the doubt that he has a genuine soft heart for immigrants nurtured by his tenure as a border state Governor.  But it still doesn’t justify amnesty because the soft heart for illegals is a cold hard heart against legals.  Where the White House is concerned, this issue has an aroma similar to that of the Harriet Meirs Supreme Court nomination and the Dubai ports management deal. 

But as in many situations there is an upside.  John McCains Presidential campaign is rapidly becoming about as popular as the incumbent's approval numbers.  That's gotta hurt.