With the rise of China, India, Brazil, South Africa, Nigeria, Turkey, the solidified European Union and Russia, the United States is in the early stages of realizing that the one nation play is over on the world stage. In fact, the stars of the big show in America since the 1960’s, the Baby Boomers, will begin retiring during the next President’s administration. That many citizens going off to pasture means that America is going to have to find people to replace them. Immigration is more important than ever in not only providing young people to fill the void, but also serving as a source of low-skilled labor to fuel many of our industries. The problem is that our political system is letting America down and leaving us paralyzed and ill-equipped to reform laws to curb illegal immigration and make legal immigration easier.

There are two sides failing us: the immigration reform movement and the pro-immigrant movement. The immigration reform movement is composed of racist, xenophobic people who were more than happy to turn a blind eye to illegal immigration during economic boom years when they were seeing lots of green, but are now seeing red as the recession has hit and the cash cows have decided to stick around. The pro-immigrant side recognizes that there are major problems with our immigration laws, but won’t take action because doing so would associate them with people that are both hypocrites and racists. With but a patch of desert between the haves and have-nots, no simple gavel pound from Washington will stop the influx. America must enforce her existing laws, which she has not done, and create a few new ones to fix the problem. With two dysfunctional sides pulling the strings, only dysfunctional solutions have emerged.

As usual in American politics, what’s missing is the middle ground. If reform in any way favors immigrants, up comes amnesty. If it curbs illegal immigration, it’s racist. Also, what’s missing is a logical string of suggestions. Many want to build a wall along the border. If a culture is superior, should it need a wall to begin with? True power is silent and I can’t think of anything louder than a fucking wall. It screams inferiority and defeat. There is nothing more elitist and un-American than a wall designed to keep those out that we have always said we would welcome in. Don’t you think we can come up with a better solution that benefits both countries?

Enforcing the existing laws and penalizing those that hire illegals would be a FIRST step. We can use some of the money from fines to help fund border security. Speaking of, how about more human capital spent on border security? That could work (Even though an extremely large majority of illegal immigrants crossing our borders are family men looking for work to feed their families). How about more money spent in funding to Mexico to help our neighbor strengthen its infrastructure, government services and quality of life? That could work because it could help some of those workers stay put in Mexico with their families where I’m sure they’d rather be. Maybe we could even have a guest worker program with a pathway to allow illegal immigrants already in the country to gain citizenship? That would seem logical. But not in America. Bills with any of these suggestions have been struck down time and time again.

We are better than this. Maybe the problem is that the generation leading our country (Baby Boomers) is an all or nothing mass of self-important idiots who perpetuate the American “drink the well dry and abandon it” mentality. When times are good, we turn a blind eye to the illegal immigrants and squeeze every penny from them for as long as we can tolerate their presence. As soon as the well runs dry, it’s time to gate off the proverbial cul-de-sac and kick the bums out. I don’t know about you, but I can think of a hell of a lot more bums that are taxing our system that need to land hard on their freshly kicked asses in Mexico before a group of below-Blue Collar poor folks that were smart and diligent enough to bypass our bullshit parade of greed and apathy to earn a living are ex-communicated.