"Immigration," writes Jeff Faux, "is a phenomenon of both sides of a frontier. Yet our egocentric American politics defines the question as if it can be entirely answered within our borders by unilateral U.S. government decisions. Thus framed, it is a debate that Democrats cannot win, because they have no credible response to non-Latino voters' fear that immigration across the southern border is spinning out of control."The immigration discussion is such a maelstrom of demagoguery and cowardice in part because no one is attempting to address the root causes of the problem, which is a very poor country on our doorstep. We're trying to address the symptoms of the problem, which is people fleeing their very poor country in order to enter our much richer one. So our proposed solutions are either too temporary, too drastic, or too ineffective. A path to citizenship for the undocumented takes care of the 12 million living in our shadows, but it doesn't staunch any future flow, and may increase it. Border enforcement sounds nice, but we've shown no capacity to effectively shut down the Mexican-American border, and the sort of domestic militarization an actual fence would signal is, to say the least, unsettling. Corporate enforcement is important, but ID fraud foils much of it, and the taller our fence and the more stringent our corporate crackdowns, the more sophisticated Mexican document forgery will become, which brings problems all its own, particularly if you fear terrorism. WHAT TO DO ABOUT IMMIGRATION.
"Immigration," writes Jeff Faux, "is a phenomenon of both sides of a frontier. Yet our egocentric American politics defines the question as if it can be entirely answered within our borders by unilateral U.S. government decisions. Thus framed, it is a debate that Democrats cannot win, because they have no credible response to non-Latino voters' fear that immigration across the southern border is spinning out of control."The immigration discussion is such a maelstrom of demagoguery and cowardice in part because no one is attempting to address the root causes of the problem, which is a very poor country on our doorstep. We're trying to address the symptoms of the problem, which is people fleeing their very poor country in order to enter our much richer one. So our proposed solutions are either too temporary, too drastic, or too ineffective. A path to citizenship for the undocumented takes care of the 12 million living in our shadows, but it doesn't staunch any future flow, and may increase it. Border enforcement sounds nice, but we've shown no capacity to effectively shut down the Mexican-American border, and the sort of domestic militarization an actual fence would signal is, to say the least, unsettling. Corporate enforcement is important, but ID fraud foils much of it, and the taller our fence and the more stringent our corporate crackdowns, the more sophisticated Mexican document forgery will become, which brings problems all its own, particularly if you fear terrorism. 
