U.S. must ease illegal workers into legality

JACKSON, WYO. — In the big Albertson's supermarket in this resort area, the genial cashier who serves me speaks with a heavy accent. Where are you from? I ask. "Poland," he replies. He is here on a special student visa that allows young people from European countries to come to the United States to work for a summer and perfect their English. Has he had a good experience? "Oh, yes. But I am sad because I must go home at the end of August, and I love America."

A few days later, my cashier is a smiling young woman, also with a marked accent. She is from Russia. She is here on the same program. She, too, is in love with America. Both are here legally on a program that has tremendous friendship-building benefits for the United States. Both must go home.

But on Friday nights over at the Western Union counter there is a crowd of Spanish-speaking men who are sending money from their weekly paychecks back to Mexico. It is a certainty that many of them are here illegally. They are largely manual-labor workers, lured to Wyoming by the housing construction boom that has hit Jackson, or perhaps by the natural gas energy boom in nearby Pinedale.

They are part of the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States, located especially in Western states like California, Texas, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. Many have crossed furtively and illegally into the states that border Mexico, making the hazardous crossing across desert land in search of more prosperity than they can hope for in their homelands. If not caught by immigration agents and sent back, some will spend their lifetimes here, creating families and having children who will be born here as American citizens.

They are part of the enormous challenge of illegal immigration confronting America that continues apace but must be resolved. It isn't being solved by the Border Patrol agents who are catching only a fraction of the illegals who continue to cross over. It cannot be resolved by the self-appointed "minutemen," who recently stationed themselves on the Arizona-Mexico border but whose efforts were more symbolic than effective. And clearly, the 11 million already here cannot all be transported back to their homelands.

The governors of Arizona and New Mexico have declared an emergency along their borders with Mexico as illegal immigrants clash with law enforcement officials, and smuggling and drug trafficking and crime have become rife. Mexico's President Vicente Fox says the need for a migration accord with the United States, which would allow more people to work legally north of his border, is urgent and would do much to improve security.