> >I am all for following the law, but I would break the law of another country if it would allow me to find a better job and make enough money to raise my family's standard of living.
>
> I would not. Breaking the law- especially of a country I'm hoping will take me in and treat me as one of its own- is not made okay just because it makes things easier for me. That's an extremely selfish and entitled sort of attitude, and we have far to many people in this country already who think they can do as they please, law or not, if it suits them.

If you really want to talk about people who have a selfish and entitled attitude, you should probably look more closely at Americans who think that they deserve a life of prosperity simply because they were born in the right part of the world, and that immigrants who risk their lives to come here deserve to be thrown out. People all throughout history have broken laws which are meant to keep one group in poverty and another group wealthy, and with time they're almost always looked upon as having done the noble thing*. This whole immigration 'debate' doesn't seem like a real debate to me, anyways. It seems like a game our country has to play in which we convince half of the population that illegal immigration is wrong and we convince half of the population that illegal immigration is right, so that we can keep the flow of immigrants at the level that is most beneficial to our country. If you really cut down on illegal immigration, we don't have enough cheap labor to keep things running. If you loosen the regulations on immigration, suddenly we're flooded with too many people for the number of unskilled jobs available. So the country keeps arguing and never really decides on anything and people keep playing the game and the politicians play their parts and get people angry and keep getting voted in to office on non-issues, until we forget we had a problem in the first place (because there really wasn't a problem to begin with, everything was running smoothly before people started getting angry) when they move on to some new cause like gay marriage or windfall oil taxes or abortion. Meanwhile the real issues get overshadowed and have almost no relevance to elections. Anyways, the point of that tangent was to say that while I do have an opinion in this debate, I feel stupid talking about it without at least recognizing that I find the whole debate phoney in the first place.

> I am, of course, lucky enough that I doubt I'll ever find myself in such a situation, but I'd like to think that if I saw a neighboring country where the standard of living was much better I would work hard to get there through the proper channels or work hard to change conditions in my own country.

The illegal immigrants do take the proper channels. We need them here, and we have an unspoken agreement that if they get here without being caught, they can live and work here. If the government itself doesn't respect its own laws, why should someone who doesn't even live here yet? There is nothing holy about a country's laws, and nothing righteous about abiding by them. The moral high ground in this debate doesn't exist, and only looks like it does because half of the country is piled up on top of eachother with the ones on top claiming that they're standing on a mountain.

*(I know someone is going to say that immigration laws aren't meant to keep one group in poverty, so I'll just get that out of the way now. Whether or not that is the intended purpose of the law, to a Mexican father looking to feed his family, it is the practical reality of the law.)