[AzJohn]

It has been proven time and time again, that legalizing illegal aliens encourages more illegal immigration....Why reward criminal aliens and punish law-abiding aliens?

I would agree that the illegals should be penalized somehow relative to those that have never broken the law. But there are ways of doing that short of having them leave the country. I did think that this was a possible shortcoming of the President's proposal, and hope that Congress does something about that in the upcoming months/years.

[dcwusmc]

But the whole idea is (or SHOULD BE) to GET THE ILLEGALS OUT OF THE COUNTRY. That is their crime: Sneaking in the back door. So why should we reward that IN ANY WAY by punishment short of deportation and refusal to ever readmit? By deporting them and taking the biometric identifiers to KEEP them out, we tell them that their behavior was wrong and we will not put up with it. This is the ONLY fair way to do it, else the LEGAL IMMIGRANTS are being b*tch-slapped by FedGov.