Last night I heard a radio show talking about Pres. Bush's idea to grant amnesty to all illegal aliens.

When people talk about illegals or protecting the borders, I usually take their comments with a grain of salt because I think a lot is prompted by prejudice.

But I think the nature of illegal immigration has changed in recent history, and we need to make changes to U.S. policies.

For a long time, when people in California said "illegal aliens" they were talking about people who had sneaked over the border from Mexico and the issues were just about whether they were taking jobs away or bogging down the welfare rolls. Truth is, neither of those issues ever got me very bothered.

Today, however, I think illegal immigration has become much more organized. Russian mafia has made for more American crime. Asian sex traffickers bring over young women enslaved as prostitutes. Even illegal immigration from Mexico has changed as the Mexican border has become the main avenue for drug trafficking into the U.S.

We need to be more organized, too.

I think the first thing we need to do is counter-intuitive. We need to make it easier to come into the country legally. A lot of people are working here illegally because it is next to impossible to get permission to work in the U.S. and the process takes years. I think that was intentional in the past. It was like an unwritten waiting period so if someone caused trouble before the process was complete we have an easy remedy; we deport them. But a system that difficult forces people to break the law if they want to be productive members of society. And unresponsive disorganization is a poor excuse for a screening process.

That brings me to the second thing we need, which is a decent screening process. Something that will prevent someone else from coming into the country illegally, signing up for flight school in Florida and piloting a plane into a New York skyscraper. I couldn't even start to say how we would screen people, and I doubt there is an easy method, but it has to be done.

Once we have a simplified process that doesn't encourage people to break the law, and we have a decent screening process in place (assuming those aren't mutually exclusive), we need a better way of enforcing our immigration laws. There are all kinds of problems with the current enforcement. The worst I've seen are documented here.

Currently, I don't think we can force people to only come through the proper channels. But when we have a decent system, then we can start talking about cleaning up the other systems.

When we put a decent system in place, the bottleneck will open and the issue of amnesty for illegal aliens will become a moot point. And when those who are currently in the country illegally finally make it through a system, who knows what we might catch, and what kinds of future terrors might be avoided.