"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free" … but legally, please. Is that too much to ask? For those who believe that opposition to illegal immigration is actually opposition to immigrants in general, yes, it is. But as a Welsh-Italian-English-French-Scottish-Dutch-German-Swedish-Albanian-American, I protest.

Liberals love "root causes" so let me suggest one. The root cause of our immigration problem is Mexico; more specifically, Mexico's inability to govern itself, something it has never effectively done since it won its independence from Spain in 1821. For well over a hundred years, Mexico was the Coup-of-the-Month Club. For decades after that it was run by a corrupt one-party government. Now the drug cartels are in charge. Mexicans are not victims of Norte Americano imperialism or exploitation. They are the victims of corrupt and inept Mexican governance.

That country has always been a basket case. Think Haiti with better beach resorts. In hindsight, it seems a shame that the United States didn't take a lot more of Mexico in 1848 thereby improving the chances of the people of the Americanized portion and creating a Mexico small enough for a Mexican government actually to govern.

So what now? Amnesty? Perhaps, but only if we secure the border first as we already are required to do by the "Secure Fence Act of 2006." Absent that, nothing else can work. All the current immigration bill would do is repeat the 1986 mistake of amnesty without border security.

A guest worker program sounds nice but would only create a permanent pool of cheap labor which would, according to the Congressional Budget Office, result in our still having over seven million illegal immigrants ten years from now even after another blanket amnesty. That would not help either the legal or the illegal immigrants. Cesar Chavez understood this half a century ago. That's why he started his own border patrol auxiliary which reported illegals to the U.S. Border Patrol and even sometimes forcibly turned them back.

A large group of legal guest workers and their probably illegal resident families would be an exploitable resource for several interested groups. First, there is Big Agriculture which wants cheap, expendable labor. Then there is the race-mongering La Raza which promotes revisionist, anti-American history and Latino victimhood and loves to foment racial discord. Finally, there is the Democratic Party for which the whole illegal immigration issue is about using welfare bribes to create a vast pool of Democratic voters. Who really believes that if the proposed bill becomes law, the Obama administration won't simply ignore its restrictive provisions just as it ignores current immigration law? You'd think that Marco Rubio would at least see through that part of the scam.

The federal government should stop suing states like Arizona for trying to enforce existing federal law and protect their own borders. And individual states should absolutely stop giving benefits to illegals. Illegal immigrants should be able to get emergency medical care and nothing else; no driver's licenses, welfare, food stamps, instate college tuition, and certainly no voting privileges.

But whatever else happens, we have to secure the border first. Build the fence as the law already requires us to do. We also need to mandate e-Verify or some similar requirement for both current and new immigrant employees. And "mandate" is the operative word. What's the point of having a voluntary verification system?

Again, the key is securing our borders. We have a national right – no, a national responsibility - to do this despite some breathless interpretations of Emma Lazarus's poetry. Perhaps eventually we'll reach the point at which the Mexican government stops printing comic books which instruct Mexicans how to break U.S. immigration laws. But, of course, that presumes a Mexican government that might actually be able to govern Mexico. Don't hold your breath.

In the meantime, build the fence!