Open the Mexican Border

Here’s an illegal-immigration-reform package I could live with: Amnesty for all those from south of the border who are here already—those ill-used souls who, having braved coyotes both literal and figurative to get here, are now, with the submissive resignation of the most forbearing lama, slaving away washing dishes in restaurant kitchens, or bent double picking grapes in Napa, or cleaning the toilets of people who look right through them as if they were not flesh and blood, and whose children are serving honorably in the United States military. In what conceivable universe are these put-upon illegal immigrants less worthy than those young men with American passports and graduate degrees in engineering from Michigan State who trot off to Pakistan or Syria to learn jihad and return to the United States cherishing in their blackened hearts the hope of blasting some or all of the rest of us to kingdom come? Not in my universe, they’re not. Open the Mexican border. Hire Israeli-trained profilers to man the crossings and weed out those whose countenances and behavior show them to have inimical motives. For the rest, welcome as a blessing their energy and acceptance and desire for all that the greatest country in the world has to offer its citizens, and help them (by, among other things, educating their children in English) to become citizens themselves.