Submitted by Alan, May 21, 2007 14:05

I am not in total disagreement with Mr. Steyn's views -- other than his stretch that the world will judge American will to reassess our no end point occupation of Iraq by our ability to toss illegal immigrants out of the U.S.

I would ask him to ponder the past. With the same horror that he views Spanish-speakers arriving on Long Island, prior generations in the U.S.A. looked upon Irish arriving from the potato famine, on the Jews arriving from Czarist Russia, "Okies" arriving in California, Blacks arriving from the South, among other waves of external and internal migrants.

Those arriving before the restrictive immigration laws of the mid 1920's had no need for amnesty or coyotes to traverse the borders. But do you believe our grandparents, great grandparents, and great great grandparents, in their desperation, would not have done whatever they could to enter the U.S.A. as they struggled to escape the starvation, wars, and bigotry in their "homelands"?

As for those coming from lands south of our borders, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador have been wracked with wars and brutality famously undertaken by the Reagen administration and enabled by the School of the Americas. Whether under the PRI or now the PAN, Mexico's billionaires and certain unions harvest the countries riches and deny its population the benefits of a competitive economic regime. Encouraging their arrival have been the U.S. firms and farms that depend upon their labor to dampen the wages of citizen workers. And the "pull" factor extends far beyond corporate America. In my suburban neighborhood, I remain one of the few to mow my own lawn. I'll leave it to your imagination to figure out who is cutting the lawns, trimming the bushes, repairing the roofs, and undertaking general maintenance tasks.

So what does Mr. Steyn propose? Rounding up the reputed 12-20 million "illegals" (many of them actually U.S. citizens born to prior "illegals")? If not amnesty, what?

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