While there's a great debate in which one side yells "illegal, the law's the law" and the other side says "our economy needs them, they're hardworking decent human beings, etc", several issues are being studiously ignored.

Overpopulation is the single largest force impelling the illegal immigration. How many ways can you slice a country's GDP? In Norway several hundred years ago, much of the economy was agriculture. A father would leave his six sons each 1/6 of the family spread. Then they would do the same for their sons. How many times can you divide a farm six or even two ways and still make a living on it?

During the wave of immigration from Europe 150-100 years ago, about half (maybe more) of the Norwegian population moved to the US. Norse immigrants would take up farming here, write home and tell about owning 50 pigs, and the home folks would think they were lying and bragging because 5 pigs was the usual size of a Norwegian pig herd. It took some time for the folks in the old country to grasp the less constrained nature of US farming.

Note, Norwegians and most other Europeans traditionally had very large families that turned out to be crushing burdens for their economies.

If population grows faster than the economy, what do you think will happen to average income and average wealth? They go down, and go down more among segments of the population that are politically less powerful. Income and wealth go down in regions that are less powerful, such as rural states in Mexico.

Income distribution in Latin America is probably quite unequal, with a small number of land-owners and businesspeople owning much of the wealth and collecting most of the income while poor people scrape by in poverty. Were Bush and the Republicans ever in charge there? Sounds like it. Sounds like Bush would like to pursue policies to make the US more like Mexico, like a country that people would want to leave. When top executives, senior corporate officials and other "big fish" take home the lion's share of a country's economic growth and the rest of the people hope they get lucky and get trickled down on a little, most of the people in such a country are not going to be doing very well in jobs and living standards.

The way to start addressing this is by rescinding all of Bush's tax cuts and going back to a strongly progressive tax structure. The bill passed by Congressional Democrats in 1993 without any Republican help was such a bill, and that turned around the miserable picture of endless deficits that Bush and the Republicans have since restored. Tax the rich, tax their income hard and then tax their estates! That needs to be done to fix America. Raise the minimum wage to $10/hr. Increase govt subsidies to universities and technical schools and make education cheaper for students.

I've heard the claim that 40% of Mexicans work for American-owned firms. That means that our rich people have some responsibility for the poor pay rates in Mexico, and the lack of trickling down that takes place there.

US firms try to treat poor Third World parts of countries as places where they can build dirty plants and pollute and people won't mind if there's dioxin in the water and lead in the air.

I'd consider cutting a deal with Mexico to open the borders both ways, investment freedom and residency both ways, so crossing the border isn't much more of a hassle than the non-issue of crossing a US state border. Maybe I'd like to retire in Mexico someday. Opening the border would remove the exploitation of Mexicans and put them in the domain of legal workers protected by US labor law. This should force upgrades in Mexican labor and environmental standards too. Upgrade them, don't bring ourselves down.

Common Market countries have open borders for workers. Why can't we do that here, have some sort of common market? People should have done something about illegal immigration 20 years ago. It's a bit late for that now.The most recent blow to rural Mexico was NAFTA, which benefited large and often multi-national corporations and others in the business of trade, with not so much benefit to the hourly workers in businesses that do import, export and retail. How much do Mexican production workers benefit from the fruits of their labor?

We grow corn in the US cheaply in part by pumping the Ogallala aquifer dry irrigating corn in places where nature never meant it to grow, and then we sell it in Mexico cheaper than Mexican farmers can grow it, and then they come here because our business deals and unsustainable farming bankrupted their farming communities, and then we Americans have the gall to complain about it.

Where do our resources come from to sustain our own living standards? They come from farming and forestry (renewable resources when done reasonably), mining, oil and gas (finite non-renewable resources). All the other jobs, from high tech to the military-industrial complex, are built on the basics such as food production.

How many ways can AMERICANS slice their pie and still have nice-sized pieces? How long can we let avaricious tycoons turn the rest of us Americans into peons?

Religious right-wingers have fought for at least 20 years to suppress awareness of the bad effects of excess population growth because their religious zealotry makes them opposed to birth control, family planning, and of course abortion. These Jesus zealots fit hand in glove with rightwing tycoons who think overpopulation means cheap labor and lots of customers---never mind that underpaid workers mean customers who can't afford much because they're the same people.

Resources, population growth issues including birth control and abortion, and income distribution ought to be at the front and center of the concerns tied to illegal immigration. We need to admit our own situation regarding resources including dependence on finite and increasingly imported oil that's eventually going to hit a peak of production and then decline. Some have wondered if 2006 might be the peak. Natural gas runs out---look at Kansas' own gas fields for a clue. Coal is plentiful but dirty and finite. Now, in relatively good times, is when we ought to be investing heavily (like running for our lives) in alternative energy resources for the future. But our Republican idiots in Congress cut funding in the 1990s for the most promising research being done for long-term energy supply, cut the funding for fusion research at a Princeton University laboratory that was making progress. I have only obscenities for the politicians who made that incredibly foolish decision.

We need to admit that overpopulation and excess population growth lead to poverty and hell on earth, not to the Christian Millennium. The consequences of unaffordable population growth are grinding poverty, malnutrition and starvation alongside greed and maybe some wealth, the reverse of technological progress, war for natural resources, pollution, and all the ills of a Third World country.

Economics is called the dismal science because an old-time economist came up with something called the Iron Law of wages. He argued that wages (because of population pressure) would FALL to the level of desperate subsistence living. This doesn't need to happen. Keeping our living standards better than that requires avoidance of overpopulation though.

Instead of complaining about people fleeing Latin America to escape their own Third World conditions and dismissing it as a law-and-order matter, we ought to be looking at the underlying problems and trying hard to avoid the same mistakes here, while being gracious and civil to those economic refugees happy to live and work here.

Baby boomers grew up with books like The Population Bomb, Limits To Growth, Mankind At The Turning Point and so forth. The ideas in these books are still valid, though smart policies and hard work have pushed back the timetables that were presented. But if people in the US and elsewhere go back to the stupid old policies that were exacerbating the problems of population growth, the rosier forecasts of recent years will go down the tubes.

Zero population growth is a reasonable goal, far more than the lunatic presumption of endless growth held by economists and right-wingers. The ideal population level is set by natural resources and how we use them. Income and wealth distribution that trickles down just as fast as upward needs to be pursued by public policy, unless we really want a society of a few very rich powerful people and a lot of destitution. That's a Republican dream, not a Democratic Party vision.