Immigration, schmimmigration

I now know why "illegal immigration" has never resonated with me as a political issue. It's because it is solely a political issue, with very little bearing on what happens outside of some state houses and Washington DC. In the abstract, I suppose, one could claim that illegal immigrants are costing "real" Americans jobs or somehow using up resources (say, ER time, um, or public school monies, er--heck, I can't even think of any others!) that would otherwise go to "legal" Americans.
The age-old argument against punishing illegal immigrants for the former is that they are "doing the jobs that we don't want to do." In many ways that is true, but doesn't that have more to do with 1) the employer who is escaping paying his/her due payroll taxes; and 2) the employer paying so little that no one other than some poor desperate soul would do the job?
As far as the latter, I would say that if we had universal health care and fully funded school systems, there wouldn't be any scarcity of resources to complain about in the first place!
So what is this really about, then? The fact that the Republican Party found another issue to stir up antagonism against "Them" as a means of creating the false sense of unity among their quite disparate factions. Hatred and fear of non-whites and foreign-looking/sounding people has a long and ugly history in this country, and slavery was merely the first instance of it. Whole political parties have arisen to service this whites only mentality, most obviously the "Nativists" (originally comprising the American Republican Party, then renamed the American party, finally to be absorbed by the Know Nothing Party) of the mid-1800s. And even though the Democratic Party was the home to the vast majority of slaveholders, the Nativists found their permanent political home in the Republican Party, albeit one that was far different than the one we have today.
Apparently, the modern Republican Party wants to recreate the halcyon days of the 1850s, since their arguments against immigration are really coded arguments against immigrants. Subtle (and not-so-subtle--a freaking concrete wall built on our southern border? Shades of the Soviet Union in Berlin!) appeals to nativism, I believe, are simply calls to institutionalize the racism in which some of our citizens still hold dear. That the racists have convinced a large portion of the populace, and possibly a majority of the Republican party, that this kind of racism is just fine, is sick, but the frustrating part of this is that the coding of their public appeals and legislation are such that many good people are drawn into the discussion even though they themselves are neither racists nor nativists!
The non-issue of "illegal immigration", if stated straightforwardly by those seeking to convince others that there is a problem--we either don't like or fear brown, black, or yellow people, and we want them to leave--would be laughed out of the public fora, and those who proposed the discussion would be voted out of office posthaste. (Remember what happened to George "Macaca" Allen?) Republicans have seized on "illegal immigration" as a wedge issue designed to split the base of political opponents who attempt to address the issue on Republican terms while simultaneously help forestall the inevitable disintegration of their own base. That it also helps diffuse efforts to end the occupation of Iraq, ferret out corruption in government, and sidetrack or derail the legislative process by which the Democrats hope to restore our country's political sanity, are all big bonus side effects.
It's simply not that big a deal, in the scheme of things, that we have people coming to our country illegally. Think about it this way: if the Republican Party got its way, and our country's economy were destroyed (further), nobody would want to come here in the first place. Helping them do so by keeping "illegal immigration" on the agenda is seriously perverse, isn't it?