One sliver of the immigration issue

I caught a snippet of some congressman on a news show last night saying that it is "immoral" for the U.S. to consider granting amnesty to illegal aliens. For decades now, American politicans and buisness lobbyists have been knowingly complicit in allowing illegal immigration from South America to go unchecked. They wrote and passed immigration laws with loopholes which made them unenforceable. The result has been a steady flow of cheap labor and an ever-increasing, and undue, strain on social services, schools and hospitals.

Another by-product has been increased racial tensions. Videos of men jumping over fences along our desert borders, that have been a staple of evening news casts since the seventies, get aired and are never put into any truthful context. So, they feed into the country's existing predjudice. U.S. citizens get the message, straight from Washington, that the good will, once so honored and cherished by our grandparents, has been made a mockery of by these johnny-come-latelys from Latin America.

If the U.S. ever wants to get a handle on illegal immigration it will have to first admit to some level of culpability in creating the problem. The whole thing could be resolved in a year if congress would willingly fine and prosecute the U.S. employers hiring illegals. Instead, in this election year, old laws will be shuffled around and renamed, leaving the same loopholes in enforcement. And the attention of the country will continue to be diverted as much as possible to the criminal outsider.