So the real question, then, is how many U.S. born or naturalized citizens are we willing to prevent from working legally through blunt instruments like E-verify -- which does not do a good job of preventing illegal workers from working but does do a good job of preventing people whose data in messed up in a government data base from working? Five percent? Ten percent of US born or naturalized citizens? You? Me?

Or we could go with the principle that those who have broken the law should make amends, pay a fine, go through a process of restititution and then we all move on.

That is what President Obama and Sen. Reid support in terms of getting immigrants here illegally registered and into the system and I agree.

If immigrants here illegally haven't left yet with the worst economy in memory, they aren't going to. Most have been here more than 8 years and almost half (47%) live in 2 parent families with children. They are here for good.

Whether through mass deportation or just waiting them out, the majority of undocumented immigrants are not leaving. Get over it.

Any plan that includes getting rid of 12,000,000 people is off the table. All those who vote for that approach on this board or anywhere else, please stand off to the side so the rest of us can deal with reality.

The immigrants are already here. The question is whether we want them legal, taxed, and in the system or floating outside so that employers can pay them less, cheat the immigrants and cheat everyone else.

I want them registered and in the system. So does Sen. Reid and President Obama and a lot of other leaders. The anti-immigration side has a fantasy that the immigrants here and already working and raising their families are leaving, but they aren't. Let's deal with reality and get on with it.

Of course we need immigration enforcement, but we also need to be realistic. We are not going to deport or otherwise drive out 12,000,000 people from the United States. We're no longer buying the hardline that requires mass expulsion before we do anything else to fix immigration!! It isn't going to happen and we can't wait that long.

We want to get most of these people into the system and playing by the rules, paying their fair share, weeding out the real violent criminals, and making it harder for their employers to cheat them or us. Lamar Smith is against that and wants you to wait through another few decades of chaos, illegality, and unfair competition so he can look "tough on illegals" but his approach is the problem, not the solution.

I agree with Olecapt. The anti-immigration guys are selling a fantasy. And the road to that fantasy is paved with unitended consequences. For example, the E-Verify program cited in the article is frought with errors. According to a new report from the Cato Institute, a free-market think-tank:

"Then we must consider the error rate in federal government databases. In December 2006, the SSA’s Office of the Inspector General estimated that the agency’s “Numident” file—the data against which Basic Pilot checks worker information—has an error rate of 4.1 percent. Every error resulted in Basic Pilot’s providing incorrect results. At that rate, 1 in every 25 new hires would receive a tentative nonconfirmation. At 55 million new hires each year, this rate produces about 11,000 tentative nonconfirmations per workday in the United States—a little more than 25 people per congressional district, each day of the working week, all year long."