"I don't know what the circumstances were here....I frankly don't have the knowledge of those facts," Then you should be fired for your incompetence and poor leadership. Its your job to know what's going on in your department and to make sure that the only things going on are the things you intend to be going on.

Why do they think that, "We're such lousy managers that our low-level employees get away with doing anything they want to do," is a valid excuse? If they did know of these things they're guilty of impeachment-worthy crimes. If they didn't know of these things they're guilty of impeachment-worthy incompetence.

There are no "pros" and can be no "pros" to rewarding people for breaking our laws.

PS -- There is nothing "isolating" about being a homemaker living in a house with some land. Such a woman is free to engage in any hobby she chooses. She can garden, write, keep chickens or horses, engage in creative cooking, do photography, breed dogs, take full advantage of parks, museums, and local historical sites, or pursue genealogical research. She can do volunteer work or take continuing ed classes. Not to mention old-fashioned chatting over the fence with the neighbors. Add internet access and she can live-chat with people around the world who share her interests and hobbies. Being locked into an office with the same 5 people every day is isolating. Homemaking is freedom.

Why on earth would any sane person want to live dense-packed like sardines into apartments and condos? We spent 13 years in rental houses with landlords telling us what color we could paint our walls, what plants we could grow in the flower beds, where the garden could be IF we were allowed to have one at all, ... You think people should aspire to this life instead of trying to get away from it ASAP?

Better yet -- restrict the federal government to its Constitutionally-enumerated powers.

What business is it of the government who buys what from whom? My summer job is attending a farm stand. Should I be obligated to see every buyer's driver's license and keep records (by hand, on paper), of the purchases of people traveling from out of state? And should the people from no-sales-tax states get a refund or a discount when they buy something at the physical location of a business in a sales-tax state?

Sometimes the author leaves nothing left to say except, Three cheers and double thumbs-up!

Exactly. The bottom line is that these people have no right to be in the US at all and should not be rewarded in any fashion for having broken into the US. It is a grave and fundamental injustice to reward lawbreakers for their wrongdoing.

Additionally, we can require that all employers who discover that they have inadvertently hired illegals -- as happened to the company I worked for last year when the HR person processing our W-2s realized that they had a dozen or so employees with the same SS# -- turn all the contact information they have for those employees over to immigration enforcement. Once we've got all that working and the border secured (via actually doing what the existing laws require), we can re-evaluate and see what steps to take next

In Re: "You can't deport X million people!" We can if we actually want to. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. We start with the easy cases -- the ones who identify themselves in public by carrying signs at rallies and acting as "activists", the ones who fail E-Verify, the ones who try to apply for driver's licenses and in-state college tuition, the ones picked up by the police for other reasons and discovered to be illegal, etc. It needn't be expensive – just transport them to the nearest border with their home country, usher them across, and let their own country deal with them from that point. Then we can work on targeted raids on those notorious "day labor" sites and on employers known to be hiring illegals. ...