The Opinionated Bastard

Over at Opinion Journal, Peggy Noonan is trying to make some sort of point about Immigration policy:

What does it mean when your first act is to break the laws of your new country? What does it mean when you know you are implicitly supported in lawbreaking by that nation's ruling elite? What does it mean when you know your new country doesn't even enforce its own laws? What does it mean when you don't even have to become an American once you join America?

Her whole point is severely diluted by her opening anecdote:

I recently found out through one of her daughters that my grandmother spent her first night in America on a park bench in downtown Manhattan. She had made her way from Ireland to Ellis Island, and a cousin was to meet the ship. It was about 1920. The cousin didn't show. So Mary Dorian, age roughly 20, all alone, with no connections and no relatives interested enough to remember her arrival in the new world, spent her first night in America alone on a bench, in the dark, in a strange country. Later she found her way to Brooklyn and became a bathroom attendant at the big Abraham & Straus department store on Fulton Street.

Peggy, did you know that sleeping on a park bench in downtown Manhattan is illegal? Should I ask your grandmother the same questions you seem to be asking illegal immigrants?

I don't think you'd like the answers.

Peggy concludes with:

The problem with our elites as they make our immigration policy is not that they have compassion and open-mindedness. It is that they are unknowing and empty-headed. They don't know, most of them, what others had to earn, and how much they, and their descendents, prize it and want to protect it.

The problem with our elites is that they've never talked to an actual living immigrant, legal or illegal. That includes you Peggy.

A friend of mine from Australia is on his 5th year of living here on a visa. Each year he has to apply, and one year later, he gets the visa...in time for it to expire...

Our immigration system is totally broken, legal or illegal. Perhaps the real answer is not to worry about whether these “illegal immigrants” are breaking the law, but to look at the law itself. Perhaps what they're doing shouldn't be illegal?

I don't mean opening the border completely, but if you make it easier to be legal then illegal, people will be legal. This is the “iTunes” lesson.

Our immigration policy is designed to make the unions and the population feel good, but as someone who lives in a border state I can say its all window dressing. 3,000 miles of border is always going to be a problem. This sort of editorial just points out to me the vacuousness of the debate: Peggy is comparing her grandmother's experience during the period when immigration was relatively open to the Latino experience now? If her grandmother was willing to cross an ocean, alone, and sleep on a park bench isn't it possible she would have been willing to sneak into the country as well?

Bah. I'm beginning to think that only California, Arizona, New Mexico, Florida and Texas should be allowed to set immigration policy. The other 45 states are just getting in the way.