"The majority of Americans of Hispanic origin believe, like Navarrette, that there is a serious problem here, and that placing the illegals on a fast track toward legal status isn't the answer...but that immediate deportation (besides being impractical) isn't either."

             I think you've highlighted the hole in your agrument by including this observation. No one on the side of containing runaway immigration who I've heard is trying to make the case that all of these illegals should be deported. This is a point that Tom Tancredo makes over and over, but the corporate dominated media in America refuses to pick it up.

             Multinational corporations in America want cheaper and cheaper labor, and the more people they can get to bid on their jobs the cheaper that labor becomes. The mainstream media is an arm of this corporate animal and they do what is asked of them. One of their ploys is to continue to announce that "deportation isn't practical."

             This plays into the hands of people like Navarrette, Loretta Sanchez, the mayor of Los Angeles, and the lieutenant governor of California. All of whom want to see the Latino populations explode because that brings more political power to themselves. To indicate that Navarrette is an honest broker in this dialogue is naive in the extreme.

             I would agree that the huge majority of the immigrants are innocent pawns in this struggle, but so are native born American workers.

             I suspect there are solutions to these problems, but the bill the corporate hit-men are trying to pass in the Senate is most definately not the answer.