"The problem of illegal immigration isn’t a matter of violent criminals storming the walls of our peaceful towns and cities. It’s a matter of what to do about the estimated eleven million unauthorized residents who are already here. The mass-deportation fantasies of some restrictionists notwithstanding, the great majority of “illegals” are here to stay. That is a good thing, since they are, for a start, essential to large sectors of the economy, beginning with the food supply—the Department of Labor calculates that more than half the crop pickers in the United States are undocumented. National business leaders have no illusions about these basic facts of economic life. Last month, Mayor Michael Bloomberg formed a coalition of big-city mayors and chief executives of major corporations—including Boeing, Disney, Hewlett-Packard, and even Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation—to lobby Congress for comprehensive immigration reform, including a path to legal status for all undocumented immigrants. Bloomberg calls the current immigration policy “national suicide... The problem of illegal immigration has been left to fester for decades. Every effort to address it has provoked a groundswell of angry obstructionism and demagoguery. Disingenuous calls for greater border security are now part of that obstructionism. The President blames, quite rightly, congressional Republicans for blocking reform, but plenty of Democrats, both in Congress and in the statehouses, have no stomach for tackling the issue, either—certainly not in an election year. Given the emotions that the topic arouses, the battle to pass immigration reform may end up making the struggle over health care look mild. It is time, nonetheless, to try to finally bring millions of men, women, and children in from the dark".
The New Yorker Magazine