Christians have even taken this instruction of muzzling the ox metaphorically to mean the laity should support the clergy.

"But what does this have to do with immigration?" you ask. To answer, I need one more analogy:

Suppose there are two restaurants in a town of 500 residents. Your restaurant, a large affair with room for thousands of tables and customers and a world-renowned reputation for great cuisine, and the other a cockroach-infested, rundown sloppy joe diner with room for about a dozen clientele.

Suppose also, you are an anal-retentive personality type with no business sense that will not allow more than about a hundred people to dine even though there is more than enough room for everyone to eat. Now we know what has to happen. There isn't enough room for everyone to eat at the Sloppy Joe, so hundreds sneak into your restaurant and sit at your tables as if they came in through the front door with reservations.

They not only pay for the food they eat, they clean the tables off and do the dishes and boost your trade so much that you can order your provisions at better terms than before and you make money hand over fist. Everything is fine.

Then one day, some idiot whispers in your ear: "Most of your customers got in illegally. You should board up your windows and buttress your door so no one can sneak in. And by the way, you should also expel the ones that are eating right now.

Yes, if you are a complete moron, that would be the thing to do. How else to keep them out?

But why do you have this artificial limit on how many people can come into your restaurant? Why not let everyone in who can fit? They are paying for the food, they make you money, they increase the general economy. The designation illegal is all a phony concept anyway; if you just let people come in as they should there would be almost no illegals. Of course, once in a while someone will try to skip out without paying for food. But this would be the exception.

Now let me tie the two together.

It is cruel for the United States to display all its bounty and beauty to our less fortunate neighbor to the South and say, "No, if you come in you'll have to sneak in." We let them tread our corn but we muzzle them as to their status in this country.

If we opened our borders, documented them, certified which ones are not criminal or Muslim, and let all who wanted to come in to work as guest workers, there would only be a handful of illegals and instead of trying to control 11 million of them we could have 10,000 officers looking for one illegal instead of the other way around.

See my previous post Let all 100 million Mexicans come to America.

No matter how high we put a wall, no matter what draconian laws we pass to stop them from working in the United States, 18 million more will come in during the next two decades. We can make it easy or we can make it hard - but 18 million will come in. There is nothing one can do about it.

We make our borders less secure by trying to keep millions out. I'll say it again. We make our borders less secure by trying to keep millions out.

Because almost a million are sneaking in instead of coming in through the front door, the true criminal or terrorist can easily come in hidden among the myriad teeming streams of illegals. If, instead, millions came in at document centers where all non-criminals who applied could get a work pass, there would only be the handful trying to cross our borders illegally. Presently we capture and release hundreds of thousands - too many to process out in the sticks. But if there were only handfuls we could then detain that small number and investigate them. After all, why would anyone sneak in if it were not necessary. Only criminals and terrorists would need to do so.

Because 11 million of undocumented aliens are already working at jobs, employers have no incentive to report any of them. But institute a sane and sensible guest worker program and employers would not be forced to hire "illegals". Once we do this right, undocumented aliens would be considered a real risk - else why are they undocumented? This is the only way to change the mindset of hundreds of thousands of employers.

As to Mexicans lowering the wages on construction sites and at landscaping companies. Screw all you Union guys. You killed the railroad industry, our merchant marine, the automobile business, steel, and hundreds of other enterprises. The past 20 years have seen an explosion in the growth of immigrants both documented or otherwise and becasue of it we are experiencing the hottest growth in our economy and in home ownership ever. I say, let all of Mexico come in to work. There is more than enough room in this country for 3 to 5 billion people without overcrowding. This country could swallow a hundred million without a hiccup.

If we document them, then all those Mexican Flag waving demonstrators can turn into American flag wavers. That is what all other immigrant groups have done, if we welcome them.

Indigo Red in his post One Flag, One Language, No Divided Allegiance reminds us of the words of Theodore Roosevelt in 1907:

"In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person's becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American...There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag... We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language... and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people."

This should apply to everyone who comes here to live. Become an American, accept our way of life - or leave and stay out.

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As The Volokh Conspiracy points out:

"I think this is the sort of subject that it's hard to make bottom-line conclusions about without real expertise There are lots of considerations cutting in various directions, and I have no real sense of how to estimate the magnitude of each, much less compare them."

In discussing the subject of "jobs Americans won't do", we are left with the same conclusion as with "shirts Americans won't buy". We can yell all we want about "BUY AMERICAN", but Americans in the end will pay the least they can for the best they can. Simply slapping a tariff of $100.00 on all imported shirts will not make us buy more American-made shirts; in fact, quite the opposite would happen. The market for out of country shirts would explode. Crack-dealers would stop selling drugs and you would hear "shirts - I got shirts" whispered at you as you pass them near subway stops.

Unions have done more to bring illegal immigrants into this country than any other reason with their egregiously high wage demands for rather mundane physical skills. Want to slow down immigration? Defang the Unions. That's the "pull"; as for the "push" it's the poverty of Mexico. Jonah Goldberg correctly points out that we need to fix Mexico as well. After all, Canadians aren't pouring into the US across an equally porous border.

Ironically, Mexico has an immigration problem of its own as well. There are "jobs in Mexico that even Mexicans won't do! Is that possible? Read this