Hey, Bill, the rest of us can "sigh" too.

But even you sometimes come up with straw men.   I don't know anybody who wants to have the situation "drift aimlessly" til it explodes.

The general consensus, aside from PDQ and Rig, seems to be:   path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. That is the foundation of our answer to the problem.

Unless I've missed something, your postings have mainly tended towards "this is a tough problem"--but no proposed solution.   The "solutions" proposed by other posters have been, to put it bluntly, recipes for disaster and or wildly impractical:   crack down hard on employers;   end birthright citizenship, etc.

We at least do have a proposed solution, which is not, by the way, "amnesty"--there would be stiff requirements (learning English, no criminal record except those "crimes" associated with illegal entry itself, etc.) which we went into back in 2007). Obviously the terms of the path to citizenship still need to be ironed out.

But what we need now is a true agreement among all those of good will that in fact the path to citizenship is the only long term solution for illegal immigrants now here. And we have to open the door to others from the outside a bit wider, so that the immigration which will happen anyway will be legal, not illegal.

Still haven't seen anything else remotely practical.