Get down to business on border

President George W. Bush's speech on illegal immigration finally gave the issue the profile it deserves. For years, health-care providers, educators and taxpayers - mostly in border states - have been complaining and pointing directly to a clearly defined problem.

But politicians simply didn't look in that direction. National leaders have passed the buck, year after year, sort of pretending that it's a state-level problem for governors and counties to deal with.

Well, the problem has festered to a point where, in the last year, governors have deployed the National Guard to patrol the country's southern border, a county sheriff has deployed actual posses to round up illegal immigrants, and a citizens group called the Minutemen has organized volunteers to patrol the border.

Meanwhile, Bush has hardly been a leader on illegal immigration. Yes, he's beefed up the Border Patrol substantially, but that's been largely in reaction to Sept. 11, npot the immigration crisis. And on his watch, enforcement of existing sanctions against employers of illegal immigrants has practically ceased. The president has failed to hear the clamor from his own political base, and for that reason, his poll numbers have plummeted.

But on this issue, more so than others, it's the Democrats who completely fail to project any sense of seriousness. The Democratic rhetoric on illegal immigration comes across as a complete facade, designed by touchy-feely people who are primarily concerned about how it all looks rather than trying to address a real problem.

"We must protect our borders, but militarizing our borders is a desperate response by the president to his and Republican Congress policy failures," said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

Really? Well how in the world, Madame Pelosi, does one "protect" the borders? There is the long-standing proposal to build a super fence along the border, but our guess is that would be unseemly in Pelosi's view.

Beyond that, it becomes a manpower problem that the National Guard proposal attempts to address.

And anybody who refers to the deployment of the National Guard as "militarizing" our borders is missing the most basic purpose of our military: to defend our borders. We'd much rather see the troops being used that way than fighting another war in the Middle East.

But President Bush also fails to acknowledge one of the most basic elements of the entire problem: the nation of Mexico.

Instead, he serves up creepy platitudes about Mexico being our "friend" and trading partner when Mexico's leaders go out of their way to avoid acknowledging the U.S. immigration problem. And they do nothing - absolutely nothing - to discourage it. In fact, there are subtle ways in which the northward exodus of workers is actually encouraged.

Those workers, after all, return much of their earnings to Mexico, so much money indeed that it counts as one of Mexico's largest economic sectors.

There's always been something completely and fundamentally wrong with images of people scampering under wire fences or swimming across the Rio Grande in clear violation of U.S. law. There's something wrong with stories about American contractors hiring illegal workers as a means to exploit cheap labor, avoiding taxes and Social Security.

There's something rotten about it all. And intuitively, most Americans know the smell: it's our sovereignty being slowly eroded.

Most Americans go about their lives trying to observe every single law. They pay their taxes. They don't want to get traffic tickets. They buy fishing licenses and follow the regulations. They don't want to break the law.

And here, right before our eyes, are millions of non-citizens who are flagrantly breaking laws, encouraged by would-be American employers who also break laws.

"We need to hold employers to account for the workers they hire," the president said Monday. What we really need is for that to actually happen, rather than just listen to politicians yearning for it to happen.

The endless flow of illegal immigrants finally needs to be curbed, rather than encouraged.