Why Immigration Needs to Be Addressed... Now.

Think of it a bit like brushing 6 inches of fluffy white snow off a vehicle:
You can start anywhere, sure, but it really is smartest to work your way down from the top, so you don't have to repeat your work and re-do the areas that you've already done...

Heathcare reform.
Pre-k and education.
Labor and employment issues.
The transitioning American economy.
Homeland security.

Each of these issues that we're trying to clean up -- craft better policy solutions for --has an integral  immigration component.  These are all 'people' issues primarily, affecting who is covered and how they come forward to receive help or wages or protections.

If the parents are underground, will the child most in need of early American-classroom-assimilation show up for instruction?  The ones with braver parents in schools districts with committed outreach, perhaps.

The saddest thing to me in the whole mandatory insurance healthcare reform is it somehow still left  so many people here working and raising families, with unaddressed ways to access care, short of   resorting to emergency treatments at the ER.

Why bother even talking labor issues or trying to address the problems of reforming the economy, and better training American workers, when wily employers who want to cheat the system understand that there's a second pool of people out there in the shadows, who can be exploited with no citizen or worker protections available to them,  when they are unseen, undocumented and being paid for the dirtiest work off the books?

That can affect public health and safety well beyond the undocumented person affected. Think, trucking say...

We've been lucky too, but if we're more and more tracking our own private citizens -- some say illegally -- to look for patterns, suspicions or any type of potential terror trouble here at home, why would we subtly encourage people, or incentivize them, to assume false identities and operate in the shadows?  

That's for terrorists, not newcomer American families and workers just starting out here, honestly hoping to learn and play by the rules so they too can pursue on faith and promise the dreams that drive so many, with so much potential, truly willing to work for it, if only they can figure out a way to get in the game and compete?  We've subtly told them, incentivized or encouraged them in past years to just get here already, even if you have to break the rules to do it... We needed the low-end workers.  Now, when we don't, people don't just disappear, even if you can't see them...

In short, doesn't it make more sense to first acknowledge the new demographics in America?  Acknowledge who is out there, and document them. 

The worst thing we could do is keep letting the issue split the country like this, with no acknowledgement that we're just going to have to re-think our clean-up of  all the policy solutions created today that don't include so many people permanently living and working in our shared country.

That's like not even bothering to clean the vehicle at all, just jumping in driving off, and letting the powdery fluff blow off on the people driving up behind you.

Not.
Cool.

Do the job right, from the top, in the first place.
Si se puede.