I urge all to take a look at the latest column by Steve Tuttle, posted up at Witkowski's site - it's chalked full of prescient points regarding the illegal immigration issue. He's dead on in claiming that it's mainly a Republican issue and the driving force is the commercial interest of a cheap labor supply. Tuttle concludes the column with the salient remark that 'It isn't so much the "immigrant" part of illegal immigrant that bothers us. It's the "illegal" part"' ... Here are some more excerpts ...

With somewhere around 400,000 illegal immigrants now entering our country annually, this is a topic that not only merits informed discussion, it demands it. But such discussion has now disappeared, the victim of political correctness and yet another in the endless string of rights movements being industrialized by those who see oppression wherever they look. Illegal immigrants now have their own, full-time advocates who spend all day every day looking for new ways this group can be considered victims. What discussion does exist centers almost exclusively on the conditions and rights of these immigrants, not whether they should be here in the first place. Just raising the questions will get you called xenophobic, racist, nativist and anything else that can be thought of to quickly end the discussion.

We might want to reconsider. We might want to ask ourselves some salient questions. For example, does or should American citizenship have any real value? Is there any point or purpose to having borders at all? Do we really believe in the rule of law, specifically immigration law?

If we answer "yes" to those questions, then we have to reconsider the way we now protect our borders and the growing acquiescence to the illegal immigrant rights movement.

And that's one of the great, unspoken truths about illegal immigration. It's a mostly Republican problem. While GOP leadership continues their incessant whimpering about values, they quietly welcome all the illegal immigration we can stomach. Why? Because it enables their rich business pals in the agri-business, hospitality, and home construction industries the opportunity to keep their labor costs way, way down. That helps keep profits up and shareholders smiling and contributing to the values-spewing Republican candidate of their choice. (If you don't believe that then ask yourself when was the last time, if ever, you heard of an employer being arrested for hiring illegal immigrants? We simply do not go after the employers, though such a strategy would clearly end the reason most of illegal visitors arrive here. Eliminate the illegal jobs and you eliminate the reason for coming.) Democrats, who pander shamelessly to Latinos, believing that if this growing minority ever votes they will vote Democratic, are not blameless. It's just that the industries primarily responsible for the illegal job market are not the industries-of-choice for Democrat fundraisers.

The "immigration problem" has easy and common sense solutions now completely ignored. Nobody currently in our country illegally should be entitled to amnesty or any free pass to citizenship unless we change the laws they broke. The consequence of breaking immigration laws should be inconvenience for the lawbreaker, not for the rest of us. They should be sent home, where we should develop a shortcut system that allows those who would have qualified for amnesty legal re-entry. We have to decide who gets in and why. The borders should be severely tightened, at least until we stop playing war. We should crack down on employers who have made a business out of hiring, underpaying and abusing illegal workers.

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