You ever been down along that border? Most of it is scrub oak and sagebrush with no water anywhere. Where there are cattle grazing, they speak in terms of 2 or 3 cattle per square mile! "Defend" the border? "Close" the border? There aren't enough soldiers, Guardsmen, Border Patrol officer and FBI agents in existence to do it. Sure, put up a 2 thousand-mile-long, 12-foot-high wall...and anybody who wants to cross it will get a 14-foot ladder and wait for a dark night - or tunnel under. 400-500 people per year are known to die trying to cross that desert - and that is almost certainly a low figure.

Some of you just don't get it. For some of these people, living 15 in a room, getting paid less than half of minimum wage and being under constant threat of being summarily arrested and sent back is worth it...simply because this is better than the lives they lead wherever they come from and because this the only way they can send money home to support their families. They will only go home and stay home if something happens to break that link. At least one estimate I've seen recently said that the number of illegal Mexican nationals in the US decreased from 11 million to 10 million last year simply because the economic bust dried up jobs. Laws like Arizona's will only drive them further underground.

A solution? Damned if I know, but repression and mass deportation ain't it. They'll be right back next month - hiding better, paid less and treated worse. If I were charged with putting some kind of a program together, I think it would include a modern version of the old bracero program, with necessary protections for employees and some assurance that they would go home when their time was up. Most of them would, believe it or not, rather be in Sonora than Alabama or El Salvador than Arizona! Much as I hate to exacerbate anyone's coronary problems, I also think it has to include some type of (oh, that dirty word!) amnesty program. There has to be special consideration for those who came to the US as young children and who have no ties to their "native lands" and to those who were born here of illegal migrant parents (and let's leave "birthright" for another day). I know some of these kids - and they think of themselves as Americans and they are Americans...except for a piece of paper.