How to fix illegal immigration: we must create sufficient grass-roots pressure to force Congress to pass the necessary legislation to fix our illegal-immigration crisis in accordance with the Constitution.(IMMIGRATION)

Illegal immigration already has the elements that might constitute a "tipping point" in public attitudes--a substantial majority are strongly concerned about a problem and believe the government has the power to address it.

--www.publicagenda.org, Fall 2007

As mentioned in the Public Agenda report quoted above, and discussed in the previous article, the American public has reached a tipping point over the illegal-immigration crisis. The overwhelming majority of Americans believes that the effect of massive illegal immigration into the United States is intolerable and that our government must fix it.

Under our Constitution, Congress is the key to fixing illegal immigration. The Constitution gives Congress the sole power "to establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization" (Article I, Section 8), and declares, "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion" (Article IV, Section 4).

Nonetheless, Congress has been very remiss in fixing the illegal-immigration invasion. Which raises the question, "Why?" While Congress has been debating and passing a wide variety of immigration bills in recent years, no major immigration reform bill has been passed by both houses. Until last year the pattern has been that the Senate has passed immigration reform bills based on amnesty and temporary (or guest) worker provisions, while the House has been passing immigration bills based on improving border security with fences and more Border Patrol agents. Then last year the public outcry against amnesty as a fix for illegal immigration became so overwhelming that the Senate could not pass its usual amnesty bill, but had to drop the subject.

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Why is Congress failing to perform one of its essential constitutional duties: securing and maintaining our national borders so as to preserve our nation's freedom and independence for the benefit of our citizens? John F. McManus succinctly answered this question in the preceding article: "In short, the border remains open and the federal government is doing nothing of substance to close it because it is Bush administration policy to merge with Mexico and Canada and actually abolish both borders."