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Click here to listen to an .mp3 of this commentary as heard on today morning's Don Wade & Roma Morning Show on WLS AM-890.

"1 Down, 11,999,999 to Go"

That was the title of Ann Coulter's column last week celebrating the deportation of Elvira Arellano.

Ann and Elvira have one thing in common. Both of them are much better at generating heat than light when it comes to fixing the manic legal regime that governs immigration to America.

Elvira never learned English but she did master the truly American language of defiant entitlement.

Prior to her deportation, Elvira said the following, "Like many others, I came to the United States to work. I came because of what NAFTA and other U.S. economic policies had done to my country in which I could no longer find work that paid a living wage."

I had no idea Elvira was such a doctrinaire trade policy wonk. And neither did she.

Elvira's channeling of Dennis Kucinich is not evidence of the occult. It is evidence of her role as a pawn for the Democrats.

One need not consult an Ouija Board to divine the Democrats' ploy--let Republicans build a fence between themselves and yet another minority electorate by not having the good sense to attack an untenable message rather than a sympathetic messenger.

At the risk of failing to fully alienate Hispanic voters, Republicans like Coulter read ahead in the Democrats' playbook, not only issuing a good riddance to Elvira, a dubious martyr even in the Mexican immigrant community, but a hope for the same outcome to every undocumented person in this country.

Coulter's advocacy is as impolitic as it is impractical.

Persons here illegally have by definition broken the law, as is Coulter's essential point, but that is the beginning not the end of the analysis.

"It's the law" is not a moral defense to laws that are immoral. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was "the law" and it was wrong. National origins quotas aimed at stemming the tide of southern and eastern European immigrants was "the law" on immigration until 1965 and it was wrong.

And for a party founded to combat the most perniciously wrong legal institution in American history--I speak of slavery, of course--we, as Republicans, need to refresh our recollections of an America that is more than a land mass, and fight for the America that is an idea rooted in a belief in individual enfranchisement derived from the God-given rights with which we have all been endowed.

As featured in La Raza

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