Sanity needed for Immigration

If there's one good thing about the draconian new immigration law that Arizona recently passed, it's that the law will probably be shot down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional. However, what no one's talking about is that we need a real solution to fix our broken immigration system, and that fact won't change after the fuss about the Arizona law dies down.

The current immigration system isn't good for anyone, whether they are U.S. citizens, legal immigrants, or the undocumented immigrants themselves, and the Obama Administration should start focusing on moderate solutions to an issue that seems to have been hijacked by extremists.

The first problem with the way this debate has been framed is the fact that people now associate "illegal immigrants" with Latinos, Mexicans in particular. The Arizona law is obviously encouraging racial profiling, and is a symptom of the thinly veiled anti-Mexican bigotry that has been prevalent in Arizona for decades.

What people forget is that there are plenty of undocumented immigrants (as well as documented immigrants) from every part of the world, and to frame this as only a Mexican problem is not only racist, it also makes anyone who brings up this issue look like a potential racist. By not framing this debate in racial terms, we could finally come to a sane solution.

Most people on both sides of the immigration debate focus on the immigrants themselves, rather than those who employ them. "Lawless employers," as President Obama calls them, are not only providing an incentive, they are often breaking several other labor and tax laws.

By focusing only on the immigrants, we are placing the entire burden on those who have committed a misdemeanor and ignoring those who have habitually broken several laws without fear of punishment. If we really cared about stopping illegal immigration, our focus would be on these employers who are still largely peripheral to the debate.

The system we have now is unsustainable; we need to focus on solutions that are humane and start treating people as people rather than as "aliens." If we don't, 50 years from now we will still be wrestling with these same problems.