Year after year, citizens complain about illegal immigration, and year after year nothing gets done.
Congress talks about it from time to time, even worked on a bill not long ago, but nothing happened.
Congress even voted to build a fence along our southern border, since that's where the vast majority of illegal immigrants come into the country, but then they conveniently failed to fund it, or funded it very, very incrementally. Only a few miles have been built.
Now it is 2008 and the talk is all of budget cuts. But if you take a look at the state's budget, virtually every aspect of it is adversely affected by illegal immigration.
Education? Children who are brought here illegally and children born here of people who came here illegally are welcomed into our schools. And yet we are accused of lacking compassion. We pick up the tab - but how much less would that tab be if we were not educating other countries' children?
Health care? Emergency rooms throughout the Southland have closed or are going broke due to high numbers of uninsured patients, many of them here illegally. No one is turned away. This is America.
Our compassion will not permit us to turn someone away who's seriously ill or injured. But the tab is left for the rest of us to pick up.
Public safety? Law enforcement is stretched to the limit in pursuing illegal-immigrant perpetrators of crime, and protecting illegal-immigrant victims of crime. Our courts, our jails and our prisons are overcrowded, with illegal-immigrant gang members a constant presence.
And for all of this, the taxpayer foots the bill.
One can be accused of all kinds of terrible things for pointing out these facts, but facts they are. No one blames immigrants for coming here to escape the dismal life that confronted them in their corrupt homelands. But it's simply not possible to allow everyone in the world to come here whenever they feel like it.
While millions walk into the country and enjoy what it has to offer, millions more work within the system, patiently awaiting their chance to come to America. How frustrating it must be for those who play by the rules.
The government must get serious and stop the flow of illegal immigrants coming into this country. Every country in the world has the right to protect its borders, yet we essentially forfeit that right by failing to aggressively enforce the border.
It's more than just an issue of fairness.
Both borders and the shores must be protected from terrorists.
Remember them?
The ones who lie awake at night dreaming of how they can get into this country and kill us on a massive scale?
And the politicians dither on.