Letter: Immigrants already here should be legal

Thursday, April 6, 2006 | 6:50 a.m.

The fundamental argument against providing legal residence to immigrants, who have come to the United States without papers in search of a better life for themselves and their families, is that to do so rewards illegal behavior and benefits lawbreakers.

Conservative talk show hosts such as Sean Hannity, with whom I often agree, rely almost exclusively on this point to discourage what they call amnesty. In this case, Hannity and others who rely on it are wrong.

When I took a master's degree in public administration, the complex mix of law, rule and past practice, which is public policy, was defined simply as whatever the government decides to do - or not to do. When police power is involved, the not to do is as important as the to do, because nonenforcement of a law renders it moot. We are not a nation of laws. We are a nation of the laws we enforce.

When police officers, for instance, give drivers 5 or 10 miles an hour over the speed limit before pulling speeders over, as is common in many jurisdictions, they condone going faster than the speed limit and make it acceptable public behavior, even though it is illegal.

For 40 years, by deciding not to enforce its immigration laws effectively, the U.S. government has been inviting undocumented workers to cross the border and work here without papers. It has authorized such behavior as publicly acceptable, even if nominally illegal, and we have benefited as much as suffered from this public policy, because we have continued to invite them all these many years.

Now, we must control our borders effectively to deter Islamo-fascists and narco terrorists, but that does not mean we should kick previously invited undocumented workers out.

Indeed, it implies the opposite. We should locate them, background-check them and provide them the legal status we have been more than happy to confer on them for the past 40 years with "a wink and a nod."

Timothy A. Madden, Las Vegas