It’s no big mystery why Bush’s approval has plummeted. He’s completely clueless on the immigration problem.

To his credit, he’s the only president in decades who has ever taken on this issue. Too bad he got it wrong.

We’ll never solve this issue until we first separate the apples from the pears: Stop talking about the illegals as if they’re “immigrants” and vice versa. The worst insult to legal immigrants is to be classified alongside those who cheated. I can’t understand why both the government and the media want to persist in promoting the confusion between two very different classes of people. The nativists (Buchanan, Tancredo, et al) only exacerbate the problem.

Immigrants want to learn English. Immigrants want to become citizens. Immigrants want to assimilate. Immigrants want to achieve everything previous immigrants have achieved. The gaggles who marched on May 1 aren’t immigrants in that sense. They’re reconquistadores. Those who can’t see the difference are clueless.

Border control can’t end at the border. It has to take place in the interior as well. Employer sanctions are necessary but won’t work because of the fraudulent document problem. We need a national ID card, not only to fight illegal immigration and prevent their gaining credentials after they’re here, but because of the identity theft problem, which the U.S. leads the world in because of our stubborn and senseless resistance to an ID card. (These same folks who object to a national ID card have no problem with passports and military IDs and other IDs which are easily forged and do more harm to privacy and security.)

We can’t legalize those who flaunted the system, because to do so would be grossly unfair to those who didn’t. Americans hate people who jump the line. And the bureacracy that would be needed to administer a guest worker program or a legalization program would be better utilized processing the backlog of those who applied legally.

High wall, wide gate. Increase the skilled quota from 65,000 to unlimited; and increase the unskilled limit rather than implement a new bracero program that would be abused and unmanageable.

What to do with the 11-12 million illegals already here? Why do anything? It’s their problem, not ours. They jumped the line with relative ease, they can get back in it. Meanwhile, no more Spanish ballots, drivers exams, bilingual ed, …

Our national schizophrenia over liberties is the primary obstacle to finding solutions to the prominent domestic issues of the day. If anything can unite the Left and Right, it’s a perceived “threat to liberty” from a particular government policy.

Privacy, a right not specifically protected by the Constitution except indirectly via the Fourth Amendment, is the most confusing one that muddles the debates from abortion to immigration.

Privacy and immigration are inextricably intertwined. The debate on immigration is inconclusive because of the sloppiness of the definition of an “immigrant”. And the problem of distunguishing a legal immigrant from a legal one hinges on our inability as a nation to resolve issues of privacy.

We get away with calling illegal immigrants “undocumented” because we as a nation haven’t fixed the definition of a document. Sure, we have a pretty good passport system, but we don’t require indivduals to have passports unless they travel overseas, and Americans aren’t as a nation world travelers. So we rely on drivers licences (easily forged), Social Security cards (no further comment), and lesser “government-issued photo IDs”.

Identity theft is rampant in the U.S. Ever wonder why? Do you think the fact that we have no national ID system might be related to the problem? And why isn’t this deficiency ever mentioned in the illegal immigration debate?

Some say that a national ID card is a threat to privacy. I say that the biggest threat to privacy is the lack of a national ID card.