Thousands of Mexicans watched and cheered at St. Patrick’s Cathedral last week as runners arrived with a torch bearing a flame that had come unextinguished from Mexico City, as part of the feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The flame, as Tamar Jacoby reported in our columns, was brought to New York City as “a seamless blend of devotion and protest designed to draw the White House’s attention to the plight of illegal immigrants.”

Hard as it may be to imagine, here’s a constituency that actually is aching for the chance to pay more taxes. Right now, the city pro vides services to hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants — teaching them in schools, treating them in hospital emergency rooms, putting out fires in their apartments. But the illegal immigrants don’t repay the city — or the state or federal government, for that matter — for the services. It’s not that they don’t want to. It’s just that the government won’t issue a Social Security number to someone who snuck into the country without permission. And it’s hard to pay either payroll taxes or income taxes without a Social Security number.

President Bush has been talking with President Fox of Mexico about ways to normalize the status of the millions of illegal immigrants living within American borders. Those efforts stalled following the September 11 terrorist attacks, which gave an unwarranted boost to those who want to pull up the drawbridge to America.

None of the September 11 hijackers was Mexican. It seems ridiculous to punish them. The best argument against normalizing illegal immigrants in America is that it rewards the lawbreakers and punishes those who have obeyed our immigration rules and who have been waiting patiently outside our borders for entry visas. But if the status of those already here were adjusted hand-in-hand with reforms dramatically raising the quotas of those allowed into America legally from abroad, then the injustice would be less. It might even be worth it to require those in America illegally to exit and then reenter under the newly relaxed entry rules, under which they’d be treated the same as those who have been obeying the laws and waiting outside.

The other argument made against increased levels of legal immigration is that it costs the taxpayers more in welfare to support such immigrants than the immigrants pay in taxes. If such claims were correct, they’d be an argument for welfare reform, not for less immigration.

New York is a city of immigrants, and New York’s mayor has often been a national leader in the debate on immigration issues. Mayor Bloomberg and the rest of the city’s politicians are ready to deal with the city’s budget problems by raising taxes on the existing taxpayers. With a little leaning on Washington, the city could tap the hundreds of thousands of workers eager to help share the burden. Instead of raising tax rates, the city could broaden the base. We realize this doesn’t count as a budget “cut” in the traditional sense, but it’s a waste for the city, and the nation, to refuse income from perfectly eager potential taxpayers.

Advocates for immigrant rights estimate the number of illegal immigrants in New York City to be about 500,000. A more precise count was made in a March 2002 study from the Urban Institute, which found that there were about 275,000 illegal immigrants between the ages of 18 and 64 living in New York City. The study further found that 80% of these immigrants were participating in the labor force.

Figure an average of $20,000 a year in income for these immigrants — the Urban Institute study finds that most immigrants have an income in this range. At that level, New York would collect $110 million in city income tax revenue by registering labor force active immigrants, legitimizing their status as members of American society, and making them legal wage-earners and taxpayers.