Illegal Means a Lot

PARTICIPANTS in the immigration debate often promote measures to control illegal immigration as necessary to preserve public support for legal entries. The image usually employed is “closing the back door of illegal immigration to keep open the front door of legal immigration.”

Though such support for the rule of law is heartening, they betray a fundamental misunderstanding of how immigration works. The ineluctable fact is that legal and illegal immigration are two parts of the same process.