Scott,

We are going to have to agree to disagree on this issue. Neither of us is going to change the other's mind. I like to deal with the practicalities of the hand that has been dealt.

The government obviously did not do its job in repelling the illegal aliens at the border.. not just our southern border , but the Canadian border also. The fact remains that these people are already here.  The latest estimate I have heard is 11 million of them. If they are to be deemed criminals , we then have a problem with rounding them up, and finding space to house them in prisons... more tax dollars spent. The same is true for the expense of deporting them.

In Connecticut we have no space available for the added criminal population. We are already housing convicted felons in prisons located in other states through interstate compacts. It has resulted in claims of cruel and unusal punishment by the inmates because the standard of care they received in the other states is something less than it should  be. These are claims made by hardened felons who fully deserve to be in prison, but who still have a right to humane treatment. In response to these claims the State of Connecticut has relocated them. There are also the convicts that are kept in permanent transit who are not counted among the permanent prison population, and who further exacerbate the overcrowding problem.

The illegal aliens of this week's rally are here wrongfully, but they are not in the same class as the convicted felons. Although wrongful in their methods of entering the country, they were simply seeking a better life. This is a situation with which I am not unfamiliar. When my family arrived in the mid 1800's they became cannon fodder for the Union Army in the Civil War. As late commers, they were hated by those that had arrived several generations earlier. For generations afterward they were greeted by a salutation of  "Irish need not apply" when seeking employment. These immagrants eventually went to work in inordinantly large numbers within the municpal services because that was the only work available. That is why you hear the pipes played at the funeral of a cop or fireman. Eventually they were accepted, and became productive citizens.

With respect to the immagrants of this weeks protest, I still have not heard a practical explanation of how the problem is to be solved, including your posts. Personally, I think the best method is to more effectively guard our borders, and assimilate those aliens already here provided they comply with our requirements of obtaining citizenship. I do agree that to do anything less would be unfair to those immagrants that obtained their citizenship the right way.