Demands of demagogues for a crackdown on illegal immigration have become hysterical, as if undocumented Mexican fruit pickers are as much a peril as al-Qaeda suicide bombers.
Some of the most strident promoters of harsh measures see a "brown threat" to the white, Anglo-Saxon majority from an influx of millions of Latin Americans.
Out of a frenzied rush of law has come chaos including political backlash from American businesses that will suffer heavy income losses if they lose workers and a muddle of lawsuits.
Before talk radio and TV rabble-rousers and xenophobes in Congress combined to kill the plan, President Bush was on the right track with good, if not perfect, reforms that opponents labeled "amnesty."
The "solutions" cobbled together by naysayers are being met with fierce opposition and court injunctions.
In some cities, stretched-thin police are fighting orders to pick up undocumented workers, even as they have too few resources to deal with street crime.
An odd-couple coalition of organized labor and business won a major victory when San Francisco-based U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer recently ordered an indefinite delay to Homeland Security's rule requiring businesses to fire workers whose Social Security numbers could not be verified within 90 days.
And another jurist, Federal Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle, ordered work halted on a 1.5-mile section of the new 700-mile fence bordering on Mexico until a satisfactory study is conducted on environmental impact of the structure.
The most significant of these developments—interrupting the Social Security verification rule—is the most crucial.
At least 8 million illegal laborers and workers are estimated to be working in U.S. jobs, according to The Wall Street Journal, with at least one-third of the construction industry's workers undocumented and 70 percent of agriculture's.
Any significant loss of that force would drive some companies out of business as well as hiking costs of food and services.
Had the new Social Security verification rule gone into effect, millions of native-born Americans might have mistakenly lost their jobs: By the Social Security Administration's own account, records on 12.7 million citizens contained discrepancies that might have led to firing.
This mess also has left the international image that the United States, whose Statue of Liberty is the ultimate symbol of welcome, is in a panic to fence itself in.
Once the hotheads have achieved political mileage, cooler heads will need to write sensible immigration reform that acknowledges 12 million illegal immigrants can never be rounded up and sent home.
