A woman crossed the border of the United States illegally. Twice. After her second incursion, she had a baby, which, under the 14th Amendment, is an automatic American citizen. She, however, remains a criminal alien. (Did I mention that she was convicted of working under a false social security number at O’Hare Airport? Yeah. That, too.)

When she realized she was in jeopardy of being deported, she took refuge in a Chicago church (despite the mythology, there is no legal status of “sanctuary”; nonetheless, the government is loathe to go into a church (even a Methodist one) and drag someone out (even a criminal.))

Now, she has sent her son to plead her case with Mexican authorities. She claims that deporting her (a criminal alien) is a violation of the Constitutional rights of her son (an American citizen.)

Okay, could someone show me the part of the Constitution that says you have a right to live with your natural parents? How is this different from sending a crack dealer to prison, even though she has a baby at home? Don’t we do that? I am fairly sure we do. All the time. Every day. And the children become wards of the state, and nobody sues (these last two words, by the way, are becoming increasingly rare in our society. Ask Sasha Baron Cohen.)

It seems to me that we never should have accepted the concept of “immigrant” as applying to criminals illegally crossing into the United States. It conjures up images of sepia pictures of women in babushkas who want nothing more than freedom, standing on a ship on its way to Ellis Island.

But that’s not what’s happening. Nobody is coming here, ready to submit to the citizenship process, spending weeks or months in quarantine so as not to bring any diseases with them, eager to learn American ways and English.

Instead, people are crossing the border under cover of darkness, sneaking in to have “anchor babies” in American hospitals, who then become their sympathy card with the media and the courts. “Awww, look at her! She’s a mommy! How can you send her back now?”

In handcuffs. On a bus. Under a judge’s order. And her son can either go with her, or be put up for adoption. Maybe some of those relatives who are escorting him around Mexico would like to keep him for a while, until his mother figures a legal way into the country.

Or maybe Madonna’s still shopping.

Just wait. Odds are that the same people who supported Janet Reno’s troops storming into the hideout of Elian Gonzalez in the dark of night will be weeping and braying for mercy for this woman. The headlines call her the “immigrant mom”—like she represents a new voting bloc or something (oh, wait. She probably does.)

See, liberalism doesn’t have to make sense. We can send Elian back to the open-air prison of Cuba—a country we don’t even have diplomatic relations with—but we can’t send an adult who committed a crime back to her native country—a country we are supposedly friends with (or at least one that we have a lot of treaties with.) Apparently, living in Mexico is worse than living in Cuba. Or having a mother in another country is worse than having a dead mother. Or being used by liberal vote-vultures is better than being sheltered by Miami Cubans (ah, now I think we’re on to something.)

The point is, we seem to have lost the whole notion of what a border is, and what national integrity is supposed to be. We want to keep Cubans out and Mexicans in, build a wall on part of the border and then somehow try to spot the terrorists and the drug dealers, while letting the gardeners and the busboys in.

The immigration system is broken, but we can’t seem to decide how to fix it—either send back 10 million people or erase the line between the US and Mexico and let them all in. We don’t have any real ideas, because the majority of Americans don’t seem to believe in America any more. Quite frankly, the notion of America sometimes seems to mean more to foreigners than it does to Americans.

Maybe, over time, we can turn this to our advantage, population-wise. If the Mexican government thinks Mexico is so bad that people shouldn’t have to live there, maybe we can strike a deal with them. We’ll let them in, and they’ll give up their sovereignty to us. All the resources, all the oil, everything. First order of business will be the new Democratic majority oversight committee to investigate and imprison everyone that’s been running Mexico for the past fifty years. Then we can appropriate billions of dollars to buy them shiny new voting machines pre-set to vote for Hillary in 2008.

But, don’t worry. Once they’re here, the Democrats will indoctrinate their children in the joys of Planned Parenthood, and before you know it, there will be fewer and fewer Mexicans every day. And, of course, by then, they will have imprisoned all the natural family planning practitioners for various opinion-related hate crimes, so the only population growth will come from celebrities adopting children from impoverished countries that haven’t yet developed lawyers.

Problem solved.