Makes sense to me...

Ronald Bailey at Reason magazine had a great post about why immigrants risk so much to come to the US:

Every immigrant who makes it across the border automatically gains access to over $500,000 of capital. What? That's right. The clever economists at the World Bank have figured out how to measure natural, produced and intangible capital. It turns out that natural capital (forests, minerals, oil) and produced capital (buildings, roads, and factories) while important pale in comparison to intangible capital for producing income and wealth. In fact, 80 percent of the capital of rich countries is intangible. Intangible capital encompasses raw labor; human capital, which includes the sum of the knowledge, skills, and know-how possessed by population; as well as the level of trust in a society and the quality of its formal and informal social institutions including an honest bureaucracy, a free press, the rule of law and so forth.

The real solution, IMHO, is to narrow the economic gap between the US and other countries - not build more walls or starve our economy of workers. Unfortunately, we often determine success relatively, by comparing our abundance to other's poverty. What we do not realize is this growing gap provides the economic voltage to attract people whose goal is simply live more like us.

Many in the US, and especially in Washington have developed a sad little delusion that a law will solve problems. While ranting that current immigration laws are not being vigorously enforced, the right is screaming for more laws.

Yeah - that'll help. These people are already illegal - making them "illegaler" won't accomplish much.

We sashayed into Iraq confident we could restructure their society and economy and learned some hard truths about what even immense firepower and squandered wealth can accomplish without support of the people. I see the immigration solution starting with realistic lists of what kind of enforcement we are actually capable of.

Our best homeland security investment may be in the Mexican economy. Making our neighbor more prosperous would keep more citizens at home.