• Click here for longer version of this essay on immigration reform

This is the greatest country in the world. I do not believe that simply because our native-born flag-wavers say it. And although I was born here, I did not always believe it. It's easy to boast about a group when you are a member of it. I am willing to believe that this is the greatest country in the world because those born elsewhere who have made sacrifices to come here - my clients - tell me that it is so.

But if this is the greatest country in the world it is, let's face it, not without serious problems. If this is the greatest country in the world, let's not congratulate ourselves too heartily, because the fact is, the world itself is not in such great shape. If nothing else of value comes out of the debate on immigration policy now going on in the Senate, maybe at least those facts will.

Congress is divided on the subject of immigration.

The Senate Judiciary Committee, after its own contentious debate, has just voted 12 to 6 to recommend to the wider Senate legislation that would afford many among the reportedly 12 million undocumented aliens living in this country new avenues to try to legalize themselves. The Senate is just now beginning to debate those recommendations. Under temporary worker provisions within the Committee's recommendations, undocumented aliens who work for six years would be able to apply for permanent resident status.

On the other hand, last December the House passed a far more anti-immigrant bill. That bill will also be a part of what will surely be very heated debate, right now in the Senate and then throughout Congress. The House bill would criminalize unlawful presence, making it an imprisonable offense. Its provisions would also criminalize as alien "smuggling" some of the activities of those who counsel the undocumented population, such as church organizations, legal aid organizations, lawyers and employers. Under such provisions, such counselors could go to jail for counseling undocumented aliens, never mind that the law will still allow some of those aliens, often as a result of the counseling, to acquire legal status. (The Senate Judiciary Committee's recommendations opposed these provisions of the House bill, even while supporting provisions that would toughen immigration law enforcement.) The House bill would also continue the trend begun in 1997 to limit due process protections available here to the foreign-born, even the lawfully resident foreign-born. That bill would further curtail their right to judicial review, a right that one would have thought was guaranteed to them by the Constitution. And some of the proposals from both the House and the Committee would make it possible for aliens in this country to be detained indefinitely on security grounds. I have clients who have fled here from dictatorships to avoid just such strong-arm governmental treatment.

When you have Congress proposing both types of provisions, it's fair to say that Congress is divided.

But perhaps we should not fault too strongly a Congress looking sharply toward upcoming mid-term elections and the next presidential election for being divided on the issues. Congress's voting constituents - we, the people - are divided as well.

If the subject of immigration comes up in casual conversation, for example, you are likely to hear strong opinions both pro and con. On both sides those opinions are likely to come from the children or grandchildren of immigrants. Sometimes those even closer to the immigrant, who ought to be more sympathetic, take the anti-immigrant view. Case in point: just the other day I happened to discuss some of the proposals being made in Congress with a client of mine. Some of the proposals are too harsh, he agreed. But, he added, we ought to stop "illegal immigration." Now the man is a perfectly likeable person, and is moreover a devoted and loving husband, and I pointed out to him that his own wife was here illegally not so long ago; it is the law that is in place as of this writing that allowed her to legalize. Similarly, another man of my acquaintance, discussing the current legislative debate not long ago, opined that illegal immigration should be stopped, entirely ignoring the fact that he himself recently obtained lawful permanent residence status after having been here in violation of immigration law.

Emotions run high on the subject, and never more so than now. American business, in industry after industry, cries for more permissive immigration rules, while the unions lobby for stricter quotas. Restrictionist hate-groups, selling bumper stickers reading "Illegal Immigration Sucks," "Deport Everyone," "Can't Afford Medical Care? Thank an Illegal Alien!" and "A Vigilante is Just an Undocumented Border Patrol Agent" on the internet, appear to have the ear of the most restrictionist of our representatives. Prominent among those is Representative Tom Tancredo (R., CO) who appears to be starting a long-shot bid for the White House in 2008 on the strength of a restrictionist platform. At the same time, massive crowds are turning out to protest restrictionism and support immigration; within the past week, there were tens of thousands who demonstrated in Los Angeles.

Even basic terminology is a battleground. The restrictionists deride the use of the word "undocumented" by immigration advocates. As a synonym for "illegal" it is probably a fair target for mockery. But the word "undocumented" is not intended to mean exactly what "illegal" means. Because the law now permits some aliens who are here illegally to acquire legal status, and because the legislature is now redetermining where the zig-zagging line between legal and illegal should be drawn, immigration advocates favor the word less likely to stigmatize the people whose fate is being considered. But phraseology aside, what an immigration advocate thinks of and what a restrictionist thinks of when they consider aliens who are here unlawfully are two very different things indeed.

Meanwhile, people born abroad continue to be willing to risk their lives to come here, whether by hiking with little more than the clothes on their backs through a hundred miles of border desert or in other ways.

In light of the divisiveness of the subject, then, it is heartening that the bill which the Senate Judiciary Committee has reported to the floor of the Senate is entitled "The Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act." Clearly it is time that this subject got treated comprehensively.

In order for that to happen, however, we must start by taking into account not merely one but by my count three populations. That is something the Senate Judiciary Committee at last appears to have realized. The fact is that the immigration question is a three-sided question.

On one side, however much it may be discounted by the restrictionists, is the immigrant population itself. In so much of Central and South America, so much of Asia, so much of Africa, so much of Europe (particularly Eastern Europe) - so much, sadly, of the whole world - it is obviously much harder for a person to make a living than it is here. Strong forces drive people here from many parts of the world. Consider what results.

I spoke several weeks ago to a part-time member of the Coast Guard, who told me that each and every time the Coast Guard searches a large incoming ship they find (and of course interdict and deport) at least one stowaway. Since 2004, the Coast Guard has been interdicting people at the rate of around 10,000 a year; and clearly the Coast Guard does not and cannot search every ship. But more to the point is the fact, which this Coast Guard man revealed to me, that the typical stowaway is not some cozy character, holed up for a nice ocean crossing. The typical stowaway is grateful to be found by the Coast Guard, because the typical stowaway is in danger of dying by stowing away. Banana shipments, it seems, are particularly risky on account of the tarantulas that are found in them, and it is not that uncommon for Coast Guard men, much to their chagrin, to find corpses stowed away among such cargoes.

Congress has had us build a length of wall between the U.S. and Mexico and contemplates extending it at great cost. Border patrol numbers have been increased, and appropriations for electronic bells and whistles, perennially popular, are predicted by at least one immigration expert to pass in Congress without opposition. And still they come, stowing away or hiking through a hundred miles of desert.

On a less dramatic point, consider the new rules that have been adopted regarding drivers' licenses. Not all foreign labor is here against the law. But to focus, for the sake of discussion, on the undocumented immigrant population, our legislators have in the last two years made it well-nigh impossible to get a driver's license for those who lack the proper immigration status. This would seem to be an effective way to cut down on unauthorized employment. Outside of our biggest cities, it is hard to work in this country without driving. But to the extent it has not already happened, I have no doubt that it will happen - what IT professionals call a workaround. Others will be found to drive the undocumented gardener, or roofer, or baker or cook to work. Bicycling will become more popular. Unlicensed driving will proliferate. To those who try to enforce the immigration controls on employment, it must feel like trying to nail jelly to the wall.

The reason that these things are so is that people will strive to better their lives. Likely as not our forebears - yours, mine and the restrictionists' as well - did just that. And the worse those lives are and the relatively better they might be elsewhere, the harder they will strive to do so by migrating, lawfully if they can, unlawfully if they have to. You cannot legislate against the tide. Get all the laws and walls and guards and nightvision scopes and bells and whistles you want, the history of the world makes it clear that when people are motivated to come, come they will.

That's on one side of a three-sided problem.

On another side are those from among the ranks of salaried American workers to whom job security is both vitally important and a constant matter of concern.

As good as our economy is, relative to that of so many other parts of the world, I believe that in general - not for this or that individual, but for people in general - for the American who makes a living by working for somebody else, year by year and even month by month he or she has to run harder and harder just to stay in the same place. On the average it takes less and less of a misstep or unfortunate turn of events for the working American in the middle or lower class to get shifted that much closer toward outright poverty. Poverty is the sound, be we never so prosperous, of the waterfall roaring at our backs as we paddle as hard as we can upstream, and the current flows faster all the time. And this is true even at income levels above the lowest. We have laptops and cell phones and can be that much more productive as a result; but we must carry them with us always, and for many people, gone are the days of magazine- reading on the train ride to work, or the business-call-free lunch. The constant decline in gender discrimination in the workplace has allowed women to work more and more the way they want to, but considering the effect on childrearing in a two- worker family, it is not a blessing that, more and more, both parents have to.

Accordingly, although nearly all of us are descended from immigrants in this nation of immigrants, one would expect some members of Congress, seeking for a message that will get them reelected, to calculate that a restrictionist message will sell, no matter how other sides involved in the question may favor immigration.

Which brings us to the third side of the question, because there is a third side. On that side is the American employer, whether he or she runs a large business or a small business. That American's interest in immigration tends to be aligned with the interest of the would-be immigrant. It is clear that it is not just the economic prospects of salaried Americans or of people in other countries that need to be taken into account in this debate. There are many Americans who want and depend upon immigrant labor. Not for the American employee only, the roar of the waterfall. The American employer hears it too, and the sound makes him or her grateful for foreign labor.

For some employers, hiring needs motivate them to hire foreign professionals with skills we can't, or can't sufficiently, supply here - the foreign-born IT professional workforce which supplements our own, the engineers and scientists we have always cherry-picked from among the best in the world. (This is the policy of "brain drain," a policy I expect Congress will maintain. And rightly so. Why not the world's best and brightest for America?) For other American employers the need is for more general labor from abroad because they can't find native-born Americans willing to do certain menial work.

The immigration question is: how to reconcile the interests of all three sides? That is what makes the question problematic.

But even considering the three-sided nature of the immigration question, I don't believe that accounts for the polarized, divisive and sometimes hysterical nature of the debate. Because even to many of those who might be expected to fear it most, immigration is so clearly beneficial. First, the very nature of the immigrant labor we are eager to employ here shows that it is obviously a boon to us.

The skilled labor we cannot sufficiently field here would not appear to pose a great threat to American labor, and contrary to the claims of restrictionists, Congress has built in wage and educational or experience requirements, and quotas, that limit the number of people filling these positions and prevent them from underbidding the American workforce where wage levels are concerned.

Regarding more manual and less professional foreign labor, employers will tell you right and left that they can scarcely find the native-born workers they need to fill these positions. Countless private households are unable to satisfy their needs for babysitters from the pool of native-born labor. And in roofing, building construction, fishing and fish preparation, farming, meatpacking, gardening - in industry after industry after industry there are American-born employers who depend on the services of foreign labor, whether legal or not, in order to stay afloat. This is particularly true of the owners of small business, whom some would call the lifeblood of an independent people. The work is menial, demanding of long and sometimes unpleasant working hours. In some of these industries, the reality (as these employers will tell you) is that good ol' American boys just aren't willing to work hard enough for the wages their employers can afford to pay them to get the job done.

History, too, suggests that immigration is a boon and not a curse. Immigration not only settled but built this country. Furthermore, America is great in part because it is big. Our founders did right to opt against making us a loose federation of independent states in favor of unifying us as one republic. (Europe has woken to this, in seeking to unify its member nations commercially through the European Union.) Our success as a vast republic itself ought to suggest that further and more global openness would only make us the greater.

And most importantly, immigration bestows on us a benefit that is, for lack of a better word, spiritual - one that is, for all that, no less powerful.

It is a benefit implicit in the face and voice of Sergio Oliveira, a construction worker in Newark, New Jersey, who after many years of waiting and hoping has just been approved for lawful permanent residence status (also called green card status because the cards documenting that status many decades ago were green).

I know it will be in the face and voice of Hector Alonzo, who arises at 3 or 4 a.m. five or six days a week to bake pastries for a large, high-end baking company that supplies our most luxurious hotels' business and social functions with these delicacies, when he and his hardworking wife and their son get their green cards, as I hope they will.

It is in the face and voice of my friend in Danbury, Connecticut, Carlos Pasajero, a man from Ecuador who first came here illegally. After working and paying taxes here for years, and five years after getting permanent residence status, he is about to realize his dream of opening a small restaurant. Carlos is blessed with the qualities of amiability, diligence and stalwartness, and loves cooking above all other types of work and is good at it. I therefore have no doubt whatsoever that, spurred on by the enthusiasm, pride and hopefulness that permanent resident status gives him, he will be successful in this venture. That will leave the city of Danbury, Connecticut, itself struggling these days, that much better off as a place to live, work and eat, for the established American population there as much as for anyone.

The feeling of which I speak is implicit in the look on the face and the sound of the voice and the content of the speech of almost every person whom it has been my honor to assist in obtaining a green card. It is even a feeling, I will say, of love for this country, rarely matched in the hearts of those of us who were born here. Being a feeling it is unlikely to show up directly on a statistical report. But indirectly it is bound to improve all desirable statistics you can think of and is a constructive power, a force for good in America that it would be a grave error to vitiate or destroy.

At the same time, the numbers involved suggest that immigration is not to blame for our social and economic ills. It is a myth that illegal immigrants come to this country to get welfare. Ninety percent of undocumented men work, which is a higher percentage than is true of their U.S. citizen or legal immigrant counterparts. Meanwhile, as a 2001 Urban Institute study points out, "undocumented immigrants are ineligible for welfare, food stamps, Medicaid, and most other public benefits."

It is also reported, and we have no reason to doubt, that there are 12 million undocumented aliens living in the U.S. (Annual quotas for legal immigration are estimated to total in the 800,000 range for temporary and permanent residents together.) Now that is a lot of people, no doubt. But on the numbers alone it is clear that immigration cannot and does not account for the kind of difficulty the American worker in general has in making a living. For it is also reported that, taking into account the portion of that undocumented population that also works here, undocumented labor accounts for five percent of the U.S. work force. Five percent. That does not seem likely to me to account for the waterfall of economic insecurity roaring in American ears today.

And finally, just as restrictionism cannot be justified on the grounds of expediency or statistics, it cannot be justified on the grounds of morality. When it is considered that restrictionists, like the rest of us, are overwhelmingly likely to be descended from immigrants themselves, their opposition to immigration amounts to this: it was good enough for them and their families but it is not good enough for others. They may have the power to back legislation that will support that position, but they lack the moral right.

No, I believe restrictionists get the traction they do because of a confusion of thought, and one that goes beyond Congress. We, as much as our representatives, confuse the symptom for the cause. Restrictionists claim immigration will impoverish us, and there are many who are willing to believe it. But immigration does not cause poverty. The problems most feared as side-effects of immigration are actually the signs and results of poverty. If all were well here, we would not fear immigration. Resolution of the problems revealed by the immigration question must therefore be sought in the cause of poverty. The immigration question is at bottom the poverty question.

At present, however, we are not addressing poverty nearly as well as we ought to be. At present, the best that our current and conventional political ideology has to offer toward the solution of social problems is inadequate to that task.

At its best, the political left, acknowledging that we have a poverty problem, would protect the interests of people in the lowest class most vulnerable to poverty through social programs. From welfare to educational programs to health care programs to retirement programs, those programs are to be funded by society at large and administered by the government. Given that we are beset by economic woes, this instinct toward the protection of society's weakest and most vulnerable is admirable, even vitally important.

At its best, the right would seek to protect the rights of the individual against undue government incursion. (That is the traditional position of the right, anyway - I'm not so sure that it is universally held on the right today. Consider the power of the executive, and which party has been ascendant as that has grown.) Among these rights, the political right values highly and would certainly protect the individual's right to property. And, considering the despotism to which powerful government is prone, this view, too, is laudable and desirable.

But by now it is clear that each side of the political spectrum (as each is quick to point out about the other) is fundamentally limited in its ability to keep society healthy. This is apparent in the tendency that the left has to lapse into a disturbing militancy, and to threaten too great a loss of individual freedom to the collective interest. The mode of operation of labor unions is one case in point. Unions need to be militant to keep their members marching in lock step. Only in that way can their members combine forces to fight for gains against management. But those gains, if they come, come at the expense of the freedom of operation of a union's members, and they are gains in which the general mass of workers do not share, because unfortunately the mass of workers cannot get into the unions. The failure of socialism demonstrated by the history and fall of the Soviet Union is another example of the failure of the left to achieve its important goals. The right (itself no stranger to militancy of late) is at fault insofar as it lapses into a tendency to favor unfairly the interests of a privileged few over those of society at large. Power is thereby able that much more easily to concentrate into fewer and fewer hands, with the result that those few gain an unfair advantage over the mass of people, who are thereby easily victimized. In an earlier age, it was the railroad magnates and other robber barons who reaped the benefits of such lapses. Their modern successors control business combinations that continue to grow ever larger. Controlling interests in huge and growing corporations thereby find it ever easier to fix prices and to destroy competition by tilting the field of competition in their favor. (The right is, in my opinion, even more at fault than the left in that our conservatives are the ones most likely to deny, even aggressively so, the existence of social problems. Though I could swear I'm meeting registered Democrats who show this tendency, too, if more tentatively and politely.)

Our readiness to deny the existence of economic problems in this country is, I think, at least partly the reason that the security issue is able to occupy the place that it does occupy in the present debate. I don't deny that security is an issue. On the morning of Tuesday, 9-11, I climbed a hill near my office to join others and see with my own eyes the smoke from the fallen towers in New York, and I was outraged and wanted retribution. But I do believe firmly that security is nothing like the issue in this immigration debate that restrictionists claim it to be. The attackers on 9-11 were born abroad, it is true. But that alone does not argue for reducing visa quotas. It argues for better security checks (and, I might add, for learning to listen to experts such as Richard Clarke, who did their best to forewarn us of security risks). The death toll on our highways does not make us ban auto traffic; we pass seatbelt laws and work on highway safety. We should, and I believe will, address security the same way, by working on security without curtailing immigration. (Even the subject of security, I would argue, should raise the poverty question. As Madrid and London have learned to their cost, as we ought to have learned from the Oklahoma City bombing, the threat from domestic terror is far greater than the threat from foreign terror. There are no borders to protect against the domestic terrorist. And as poverty abroad has bearing on foreign terrorism, so poverty at home has bearing on domestic terror.)

The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, too, illustrates the inadequacy of our conventional views on poverty. In one revealing story, we read that refugees from the storm, most or all of them blacks from poor parishes in New Orleans, were at first invited to shelter themselves in a large public building in a relatively prosperous community outside Louisiana. Before long, however, welcome turned to revulsion; I do not believe that was racism as much as it was an expression of reluctance to bear, however communally, the burden of an influx of poor people. These refugees - Americans all - were asked by their fellow Americans to go elsewhere.

On the one hand, then, we have the reactionary impulse to deny that we have economic problems. On the other, we have the failure of the substantial social programs we now fund to deal adequately with those problems.

Nor does centrism, the politics currently being most resorted to by our legislators as they seek to avoid the divisiveness these problems bring, seem able to address these problems with greater success. As House Representative Jim Kolbe (an Arizonan Republican) put it recently concerning the Congressional debate on immigration: "Rarely have I seen an issue that divides people so clearly, with so little possibility of seeking a middle ground." Centrism only manages to juggle two half-truths without producing wholeness.

What is needed is a third view, one taken not merely from the middle ground but, as it were, from a vantage point above the plain of confusion. This would be a perspective on social problems which is independent of, but capable of appreciating the characteristic strengths in both conventional views while spotting wherein they cannot move us forward. There must be such a view. In this great country of ours, bums (that is, men and women) sleep in doorways; in other countries, there are entire families, men, women and children, who sleep that way, and it is not enough, and not accurate, for us to dismiss them with the phrase, "they don't want to work." We can no longer do what increasingly we seem to want to do, which is to pretend that they do not exist, and to celebrate as a hero the mayor of a mighty city who would shift them out of sight while doing nothing whatever to better their condition.

There is such an independent view. I believe it reconciles the valuable and otherwise apparently irreconcilable features of left and right. That view values the respect for private property and the rights of the individual to be free of government interference which have sometimes been the hallmarks of the political right. And it values the concern for social problems and the reliance on government and social arrangements for the protection of the interests of the lowest classes which make liberalism admirable. This third view would seek to understand and use the democratic process to combat monopoly; it sees monopoly as wrongly burdening the general field of business and robbing the general population of the ability to make a living. According to this third view, social arrangements which not only permit but encourage such monopoly also necessitate a too-great involvement of government in affairs which are better left to individual and private enterprise.

This is a view which was once actively debated in Congress and elsewhere in this country. I think it is high time it was revived and reintroduced into our thinking on social problems, whether they are the problems involved in the immigration question or others like them. I will do no more than highlight its salient features here, but I will at least do that.

It was, as it happens, a thoroughly American thinker who most cogently developed and promulgated that view. Perhaps it was inevitable that the seminal insight that allowed him to do so came to him at the time and in more or less the place of the closing of our national frontier, the same frontier that made independence the mark of our national character and played a vital role in raising this country to greatness. Resting during a horseback ride he had taken into the hills outside San Francisco one afternoon in the late summer of 1869 (just a few months after the completion of the transcontinental railroad), a journalist named Henry George had a casual conversation with a passing teamster on the subject of land values. It was that conversation which brought him the insight he had begun seeking in earnest some months earlier during a visit to New York. He had determined while back east to understand the relationship between the advance of civilization and the amassing of great fortunes, on the one hand, and the concomitant deepening of poverty on the other. At this moment at the time of the closing of the frontier, it was the rise of land values, accompanying both the progress of civilization and the deepening of poverty, that struck him as being vitally important. From that point forward, he worked it out that it was not the growth of population or other theories popular in his day that accounted for the ongoing and increasing insecurity of employment and poverty as civilization progresses, but social arrangements which allow a few individuals to monopolize the wealth that is created by the presence of society. To George (and to the multitudes who were influenced by his ideas), the poverty question was at bottom the land question.

Where a society is increasingly able to produce great wealth and yet its population finds it increasingly difficult to make a living, the fault must lie not with production but with distribution. George is not the only person to have seen this. But foremost among those who did he was the one who worked out the problem with distribution: If, as he understood, it is the development of society at large that creates and increases the value of land, then the privileged few who own most of the land of a country, enabled by that ownership to demand rent from their countrymen in return for permission to use the land, thereby rob the mass of people of wealth that is rightly theirs.

The thinking of George and of the men and women who followed him suggests how, in this nation of immigrants, immigration has come to be at once so greatly appreciated and so bitterly vilified. As that thinking made clear, there have been other social dynamics that, like immigration, tend to benefit society greatly but, closely debated by legislatures, have sometimes been feared as threatening economic harm. The growth of population, the advance of mechanical invention, the policy of free trade, all are of tremendous potential value to the development of civilization. A comparison of the quality of life in sparsely populated areas with that made possible by the growth of towns and cities shows that population growth aids - indeed is practically synonymous with - the development of civilization. The huge increase in wealth-producing power made possible by such technological advances as the telephone, the airplane, electromechanical devices and the computer, demonstrates the value of invention to society. The mutual benefit, both commercially and culturally, available to both sides of any freely arrived at commercial exchange suggests the value to nations of free trade.

And yet all of these things have been, and continue to be, regarded sometimes as anathema to society. Even in a land where abortion is controversial and even among those who would outlaw it as a violation of the moral order, the birth of a baby is not always, as a matter of policy, viewed as a cause for celebration. Rather, it has long been established economic thinking in conservative as well as liberal quarters that the growth of population naturally tends to outstrip the capacity of nature to provide subsistence, or that there is a fixed fund of capital out of which wages must be paid so that the more people there are seeking work, the less wages the average worker can get. So ingrained can the fear of population growth become that even in times where the rate of population growth has been negligible or negative, even in countries such as ours where we publicly abhor the practice, there may be a private readiness to consider as reasonable such a thing as China's coercive population control policy (i.e. forced sterilization once a couple has had a child). As to invention, when times are tough, such that the general mass of laborers finds it hard to keep or to find employment, technological advances are sometimes seen as inimical to social health. There are then some who would almost rather return to more primitive methods of production than use the tools that invention provides. As to free trade, protectionism (the policy of burdening trade with protective tariffs, ostensibly to protect "home industry") has been a part of our legislative debate since at least the nineteenth century.

In each case, it is the existence, and often the deepening, of economic woes - the problem of unemployment, the concomitant fear of job loss, the existence and even deepening of the problem of poverty - that causes us to fear these dynamics that would otherwise be welcomed and celebrated wholeheartedly. In each case, the only thinking that I am aware of that has provided insight is the independent view of the type I have mentioned. In my opinion that must be a view which introduces the land question into the relevant debate. For, as George saw, as long as our arrangements concerning private property in land permit the monopolistic amassing of great fortunes at public expense, any advance in the development of civilization can benefit only the landed interests by raising rent and will impoverish the rest of the people. (That is why he advocated legislation which would impose a single tax on ground rent.) And that is true whether the advance is brought about by population growth, the march of invention or free trade.

So it is with immigration. Though immigration is in so many ways a boon to America, Congress and many people outside Congress in this nation of immigrants fear and would limit it, even ban it. The beneficial nature of immigration itself makes clear that, as with other beneficial dynamics similarly feared, immigration is not at fault. It is the poverty question that needs to be addressed, and that with an independent mind, if we would solve the three-sided immigration question. Address the poverty question and we lessen the drive to migrate, the need to import foreign labor and the fear of competition for jobs.

On the other hand, if we continue business (and analysis) as usual, given the waterfall effect, people will continue to die trying to get here and our population will continue to be divided and will continue to suffer on account of the issue. Moreover, while we are satisfied to look at the matter narrowly and in a piecemeal fashion, we deepen the problems underlying the debate. For example, beefing up security and increasing enforcement, however justified, are expensive. The cost for such things is borne by the taxpayer. It will add to the pressures which make immigration a ground for ongoing problems and debate.

Our current approach can be characterized all too aptly as a Red versus Blue animosity. I myself lapsed into that attitude during the last election, and I have come to feel as a result that this way of looking at things is a complete waste of energy. If we are to improve things we must, like my immigration clients, adopt a more constructive attitude towards dealing with social problems.

Why should we let ourselves be driven by the fear of a downward pull from downtrodden outsiders? Why not instead revel in being the lifting force that pulls the whole world upward? On this question as on others like it we can lead the world. The motto on the base of the Statue of Liberty reminds us we have done so before. And because immigration is a boon both to the host nation and to the immigrant, in favoring it we better ourselves not only practically but morally, by helping the outsider.

If, however, we go the wrong way on this issue, the implications are ominous both morally and practically. As the Senate Judiciary Committee appears to have realized, if we act fearfully - and wrongheadedly - we will do nothing but establish, or reaffirm, our willingness to scapegoat millions of people who are members of our own community. If we ever did actually follow the exhortation on the restrictionist bumper sticker to deport everyone, only we who were born here could serve as the pool from which we would select the next outcastes.

Empire after empire has fallen. Egypt. The Incan. The Aztec. Greece. Rome. Others have declined. With all due respect to Western Europe, Britain is not what it once was. Nor is France. Nor Spain. Nor Portugal.

This is the greatest country in the world. Although I have not visited every country that I would like to see (New Zealand comes to mind at the moment), and so cannot make the surest claim, I am, as I say, willing to believe that we are. But I also believe that if we are to remain a great country and not decline or fall to ruin as others have, we must think more clearly and deeply on the forces bearing down upon us in connection with the immigration question. Otherwise, those forces will tear us apart.

I believe there are those in Congress, even as interested as they are in election, who would like to help this country in this matter. When Senator Kennedy, insisting that provisions concerning the fate of our undocumented population remain an important part of the debate, told the Senate Judiciary Committee two weeks ago, "this issue is NOT going away, like some other issues," he was right. But if the matter is not to remain a mere political football, with progress on reconciling the different sides limited to jiggering quotas up and down or playing chicken with the Constitution, it may well be that the American people, thinking more clearly on the subject than we have been doing, will have to point the way so that Congress can achieve real progress.

Maplewood, New Jersey
March 30, 2006