Turning almost 12 million illegal immigrants into felons will aggrivate the problem and solve nothing

From the Houston Chronicle editorial board, courtesy of RealArt:

AFTER an intense debate that saw an unusually high level of Republican infighting, members of the Senate Judiciary Committee rejected proposals that would have turned the 11 million or more illegal immigrants in the United States into felony fugitives. Members of the U.S. House, however, did not flinch: They passed a similar proposal by a wide margin last December.

Should such a large segment of the U.S. population be turned into criminals, how would their arrest, imprisonment and deportation be accomplished? The draconian antidrug laws passed in the 1980s should serve as a warning example.

Clickhereforallofit.

Lets think about the logic behind making illegal immigrants felons. The whole case is that they're illegal immigrants. Immigrants. So they want to put these non-citizens in U.S. prisons. Isn't that implying some kind of citizen-like status for these supposed illegal immigrants? It just seems a little contradictory to keep someone here for the crime of being here.

Here's something that I posted back in August about the Minutemen who argued that immigrants "steal our jobs":

Don't they realize that the term "steal our jobs" doesn't make any sense? There's only one person who can take your job away, and thats your boss. They should be pissed at people who employ illegal immigrants, not the immigrants. They wouldn't be here if they couldn't get jobs in the first place, and they wouldn't get jobs in the first place if the government would punish employers for doing so.