More unseriousness in immigration debate

Jack Kelly:

Susie Morales lives on a ranch west of Nogales. When she cooks supper, she keeps a rifle on the kitchen table, because her home has been broken into so often.

Susie used to offer food and water to illegal aliens crossing her property, but can't any more because what was once a trickle is now a flood, she told Leo Banks, who wrote about her and other south Arizona ranchers in National Review Online.

Stories like Susie's illustrate why there is so much anger in the debate on illegal immigration.

There are between 11 and 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States. At the low end, that's equivalent to the population of Michigan. At the upper, Ohio.

The first responsibility of nationhood is to provide security at the borders. The leaders of both political parties have failed us grotesquely. Worse, they seem not to care.

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The other major feature of the immigration debate -- dishonesty -- was on display in the massive demonstrations held in Los Angeles and other cities March 25-26 to protest the House-passed bill on border security. The news media described these as rallies for "immigrant rights," but civil rights leader Joe Hicks demurs:

"Many Latino immigrant-rights organizers ... seem to be saying there is some inherent right being expressed when people sneak into the country, thumb their noses at the law, and make fools of those who wait patiently in foreign lands for visas to come to the United States," Mr. Hicks wrote in the Los Angeles Times. "What we are witnessing is not the birth of a new civil rights movement but the attempt to render meaningless the concept of border controls."

There were more Mexican than American flags at these rallies, but most were, figuratively speaking, airbrushed out of news photos. Nor did most in the media mention these rallies were organized largely by radicals who hope to detach the Southwest from the United States and restore it to Mexico.

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