Illegal Immigration

What to do about illegal immigration?
Secure the borders, of course, but then what? What do we do with the 12 to 15 million illegals – Hispanics, yes, but also Europeans, Africans, Asians and even Canadians – already in the country. (And no, they won’t just go back home on their own if we cut off their employment. Being in the U.S. without jobs is still a lot better than being back there without jobs.)
Despite the bare-knuckle conservative bravura of some 5th District candidates, the fact is that we cannot feasibly deport all these people. Not without becoming a police state.
How else could we possibly round up and hold them en masse except by using the military, and by violating civil rights of innocent Americans – immigrants and otherwise – left and right? Once we have them herded into containment camps, what then? Send them back in cattle cars? In the holds of cargo ships? Or just march them along at bayonet point?
And what makes us think their countries of origin would even take them back? Mightn’t they end up like the women, children and elderly of ancient Alesia, who were thrown out of their own fortified city by the Gallic leader Vercingetorix, then refused escape through Caesar’s siege walls and left to hopelessly wander and starve in the no-man’s land between two powers?
Amnesty for current illegal aliens is necessary; decades of the problem being ignored by Republican and Democratic legislatures and administrations have made it so. Call it a necessary evil if it makes you feel better, but it is necessary.
Certainly, let them start their path towards citizenship at the back of the pack, from the day they first register as legal resident aliens and not when they first got here. Or, if they prefer, allow them guest worker status with the ability to leave and return as they wish. These are procedural details which can be worked out.
But the idea that we can deport 5% of our population without irreparably damaging our nation and our Constitution is ludicrous.