What would Martin Niemoller think about Arizona?

[Cloud]

"Controlling" the borders is fine, and worthwhile. Compassion showed, yes, even to illegals, who are almost always between a rock and a hard place, and their families, who are often legal, is essential.

This is more than an abstract political question to me. It directly affects 100% of the people around me. My life has been intimately entwined with Mexico, with Mexicans, with Mexican Americans forever. I'm a Western girl, brought up in the areas of the US that used to belong to Spain. I've visited Mexico since I was very small, I speak Spanish. My parents sponsored entire families to get their green cards and subsequent citizenship. My parents retired in Mexico, I went to college there, I fell in love with a Mexican and had a child with him who had dual citizenship until she was 21. I'm about as Mexican as I can get without actually being one. So, yeah--I'm empathetic to the problem.

Presently, I am seeing families torn apart, and people fleeing from violence. I am seeing the complex, and completely intertwined relationships--business, economic, social, and familial that form across the border. I don't particularly want illegal aliens here, but I decry the simplistic approach of just "securing the borders" or "sending them all back to where they came from."

Am I for "control" of the border? Am I for a better immigration scheme? Sure! But I urge everyone to consider that no single phrase or simple approach is sensible to apply to this very difficult and heartrending problem.