Those earlier outreaches might have been foolish or craven, in addition to opportunistic, but they were extensions of the franchise to more and more of the natives. Today’s phenomenon is the heedless pursuit of votes, anybody’s votes, to the extreme of destroying the country as the cost of importing them. It is a form of treason, and a betrayal of the citizens these politicians have been elected to represent.

The tragedy is that so few Americans seem to see that their citizenship risks being diluted into meaninglessness and that soon they and their children will have no more say in the direction of their country than any illegal alien who happens to be here at election time. (Ask Bob Dornan whether or not illegal aliens vote in American elections.) Unlike the Americans, the illegal aliens all have another country of their own, in whose politics (such as they are) they can participate.

That last is something that always gets lost in the tedious debates over what the United States and Americans owe the immigrants and illegal aliens in our midst: that they all have home countries to which they can return, and to whose social safety net, such as it is, they are presumabley entitled. Remember the recent contretemps over Rep. Tancredo’s asking the INS to take action after a Mexican illegal alien youth and his family announced, on the front page of the Denver Post with pictures, that they were here illegally but wanted the boy - who had already benefited from American taxpayer-funded high schooling - to attend college at in-state rates? I found it curious that no news story or opinion piece thought to mention that the boy, as a Mexican, could attend a Mexican university - some are quite good - for next to nothing. HRS