Focus on border security and illegal-alien amnesty does not address the entire immigration problem. Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, cis.org, wrote a June 1 essay for National Review Online ("Legal, Good / Illegal, Bad? Let's call the whole thing off.") that reminds us of the problems inherent in our legal-immigration system as well.

Krikorian writes that even if we were to amnesty all illegal aliens and increase legal immigration, as the current Senate bill calls for, "most of the problem would remain."

Krikorian goes on to say, "More broadly, as James Edwards of the Hudson Institute has written, legal and illegal immigration have risen in tandem, the same countries dominate the two flows, legal immigration creates the networks that enables illegal immigration to take place, and the screwy mechanics of the legal immigration system raise expectations abroad such that people see themselves as entitled to come to America, whether they have permission yet or not.

"What's more, every year large numbers of illegal aliens use the 'legal' immigration system to launder their status. Edwards points to a survey of new 'legal' immigrants which found that fully one-third had been illegal aliens at one point or another, a figure that rose to two-thirds for Mexicans. It's not too much of an exaggeration to say that our 'legal' immigration system is a permanent rolling amnesty for illegal aliens...."

Krikorian makes points in the essay and elsewhere about the costs to American taxpayers of such legalization and of legal immigration in general, which, in our country now, is a massive importation-of-poverty program. We are being flooded with immigrants who do not have a high school education and, in many cases, are barely literate in their own languages. They may be legal, but they're still uneducated, and this costs us and will cost us.