Free Republic

Marcial Rodriguez, a U.S. Marine who grew up in a Mexican farming village, is offended that the country he went to war for might deport his relatives who are living here illegally. Three months after the lance corporal returned to Ohio from the fighting in Iraq, the U.S. House adopted a bill that would make Rodriguez's cousin a felon for being one of the nation's 11 million illegal immigrants. Rodriguez, 20, said he enlisted in the Marine reserves to repay the debt he felt owed to a country that had given him an education and a home for his family....

Half a million infiltrators a year - this is the prevailing estimate. Half a million make their way almost openly across the porous border between Mexico and the United States and cross the desert to Los Angeles. Twelve million Mexican immigrants are living in America illegally. The irony is that the Promised Land to which they are coming will perhaps no longer be one if they continue to come. Their immigration brings with it an individual promise, but also the seeds of a collective calamity. The absorbing country - the slow, convoluted, bureaucratic giant - is not capable of dealing...