[John Kilduff]

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Fair enough but what we're talking about are the millions of illegals (and their children) who are ALREADY here - not the new immigrants who might come. Blame Mexico if you like, but the fact is there are many illegal immigrants living and working in our cities and towns. Their kids go to school with our kids.

This is a practical issue. Rounding up all these millions of illegals and sending them back to wherever they came from would be inefficient, costly, and probably harmful to segments of our own economy. So a guy like McCain has the guts to try and find a workable compromise solution to this very complex problem - and everyone just yells "amnesty!" as if it's the most horrible thing they could imagine.

I don't think most democrats or republicans would object to better control of our borders. If only legal immigrants came to the US from now on, that would be fine with me. I am not a fan of illegal immigration. But it seems counterproductive (not to mention mean) to insist on rounding up and deporting millions of people who are already here because their own country was horrible, and we couldn't control our borders to stop them.

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Ok and I'm not opposed to lenience as a general principle in most kinds of enforcement (including lenience even in criminal matters unrelated to immigration).

I think a big part of the opposing argument, though, is not how bad a current amnesty would be, but what it would do for the future: it would send a clear signal that amnesty is what to expect and thereby encourage even more illegal immigration. I've read that's what the last actual amnesty did (under Clinton or was it Reagan? I forget).

I do think the USA has been getting more illegal immigrants than can effectively be assimilated for the given time span and I suspect that problem would become more exacerbated.

I don't think balkanization (non-assimilated pockets, cities or perhaps even later, regions) within a country is a good thing.

So that's what I see as the opposing argument. I don't think there are any clear or easily workable solutions on either side of this debate. Perhaps removing all welfare would greatly disincentivize most illegal immigration; I don't know, but that's the only relatively "easy" and likely fairly effective solution I can see at this point. I'm leery of a fence because I suspect it could be used in the future to keep people IN as well as OUT.