[Luis Gonzalez]

The number of illegals already in the country will not go down as a result of a functioning guest worker program, but look at it this way.

If your basement was filling up with water, what would you do first?

Try bailing the water already in there, or stop new water from coming in so you can then address the flood?

So we have two different problems that need to be addressed differently...we need to enact effective policy to regain control of border crossings, then we need to do something about the people already here illegally.

That's the tougher of the two problems to deal with.

[dirtboy]

So we have two different problems that need to be addressed differently...we need to enact effective policy to regain control of border crossings, then we need to do something about the people already here illegally.

Agree 100 percent there, Luis. I deal with the same concepts with data hygiene - you first fix your inbound streams, and then you clean up your database. Once we get better border security in place, we can have a good political donnybrook over what to do with those already here. But any such debate is moot until we can regain control of our borders.

Plus, if we've learned anything about modern politicians, you have to force them to carry out what they don't want to do BEFORE you grant them what they really want - or else they won't ever get around to doing the tough stuff.