Editorial: Rational action needed

Sunday, April 23, 2006 | 7:25 a.m.

Vigilantes building makeshift walls along foreign borders and children forced to use buckets as toilets in their classrooms sound like images from a Third World country.

But they're not. These are American images, and they represent some of the more extreme examples of what the ongoing immigration debate is eliciting in communities across the country.

According to the Associated Press, a leader of the Minutemen Civil Defense Corps, a civilian watch group that opposes illegal immigration, said he was giving President Bush until May 25 to send military reserves to the Arizona-Mexico border to erect a fence. If no troops arrive, the spokesman said, the Minutemen will start building border fences on their own in portions of Arizona, Texas, California and New Mexico.

On March 27 an elementary school principal in Inglewood, Calif., imposed a lockdown at his school to prevent students from leaving to participate in immigration rallies. About 40,000 students across Southern California left classes that day to attend demonstrations. The elementary school's lockdown procedures, for use in only the most severe situations, call for preventing students from leaving their classes - even to go to the restroom. So students were forced to use buckets in their classrooms. A school district official called it "an honest mistake" on the part of the principal.

But it illustrates how frenetic this debate has grown. While House members are calling for criminalizing the millions of illegal immigrants who are already working and living here, a divide among Senate Republicans prevented passage of a bipartisan measure that promised some sanity - such as a guest-worker program and a plan for these immigrants to attain citizenship.

While the issue of illegal immigrants has been dissected and discussed for years, it is only in recent months that Congress has seriously tackled the challenge of enacting some actual policy reform. When Congress returns next week, the debate will continue on this most contentious legislation.

We want federal lawmakers to hear the public's cries for reform. But we hope they can disengage their decisions from the highly emotional - and sometimes ludicrous - actions of those who seek to influence them. Urgent decisions should still be rational ones.