People sympathetic to illegal/undocumented immigration group immigrants who have come to live in the US without permission with those who have, and claim they do work the citizenry won’t do and contribute to the overall welfare of the country. Unsympathetic people group them with other lawbreakers, and claim they place a burden on US social, criminal and judicial systems which they do not support financially with their taxes. Both positions are argued from the heart, not the head. We simply do not know and, tragically don’t seem to want to know, the true impact on the US, of our de facto open border policy.

Recent high profile cases, in which predators have been quickly released to the streets to commit additional crimes, have exposed a criminal and judicial system that is so over worked and under resourced, that it is making careless mistakes with fatal consequences.

We need to know more than we do in order to make sound decisions relative to illegal immigration and its impact on our society and our institutions. It would be a shame to push our government toward anarchy if, by taking a realistic look at contributing factors rather than just seeing what we want to see, we can take reasoned action that will actually solve the problem.

How much of our judicial system’s apparent melt-down is due to being overburdened by predators imbedded in our undocumented immigrant population? Would our courts be as busy and our jails as crowded if we were able to actually manage immigration? Perhaps we need to devote some resources to actually studying and tracking how many undocumented people are placing demands on our social systems and services. If our lack of immigration oversight and control is attracting predators