Illegals -- the political 'untouchables'

Great editorial by Mark Steyn in the Chicago Sun-Times bq. It goes down so well that Gov. Howard Dean's started using it, too. And why not? It's beautifully coded imagery: Whether you came here as slave owner or slave, standing in line and filling in the paperwork or through the express check-in, everyone's an immigrant, and all the rest is fine print... bq. Like so much Media-Democrat conventional wisdom, its uselessness or harmfulness as practically applied is less important than the fact that it advertises your niceness. So, for Democratic presidential candidates, being a moral poseur is the default position on immigration. After all, to be concerned about immigration is, as they see it, to be a racist. And he zeroes in for the money quote: bq. ...And I guess the answer is this: There are supposedly up to 10 million illegals living and working in America. It's not politically possible for a civilized nation forcibly to deport a population three times as big as Ireland's. bq. So which of the remaining options is the least worst? To leave a population 20 times bigger than that of Dean's Vermont living in the shadows, knowing that those shadows provide cover for all sorts of murky activities -- from fake IDs for terrorists to election fraud. Or to shrug ''They're here, they're clear, get used to it,'' and ensnare them, like lawful citizens, within the coils of the bureaucracy. But then he goes on to say: bq. The president has opted for the latter option. A pragmatic conservative could support that, but only if the move was accompanied by a determination to address the ''root cause'': the inertia and incompetence of America's immigration bureaucracy. But there's no indication in the president's remarks that he's prepared to get serious about that. America takes in roughly a million legal immigrants and half-a-million illegals each year. Even routine visa and green card application take years to process: two, five, 10 years. Not because the feds are spending two, five or 10 years doing unusually thorough background checks, but just because that's how long it takes to shuffle the paperwork. Imagine a branch of ''60-Minute Photo'' that takes 60 minutes to develop the photos but three months to move them from the front counter to the lab at the back and another eight months to move them from the lab back to the counter. Right now, the system has a backlog just shy of 5 million. Drop another few million from the Undocumented American community in their laps, and lawful immigrants can add another half-decade and a couple more circles of hell to their own applications. And wraps up with: bq. The world's most powerful nation has an illegal immigration problem because it has a legal immigration problem. Transferring millions of people from the unofficial shadow network to the arthritic bureaucracy that allowed the problem to get this big is unlikely to solve it. Interesting thoughts -- this is a hard issue and one that will not go away for any president. Dealing with it now is much better than dealing with it down the road - we just had eight years of that and look where we are now...