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Peggy Noonan on Aliens and Alienation

If there is a better way to say what Peggy Noonan says here about the current struggles over illegal immigration and their connection to the larger questions of people and their sense of alienation from a government that will not do obvious and needed things, I don't know what it is and I don't imagine that a lifetime of writing and trying would help me get any closer to it.  Do take the time to read it and digest it and, in so doing, especially consider these words: 

In the past four years, I have argued in this space that nothing can or should be done, no new federal law passed, until the border itself is secure. That is the predicate, the commonsense first step. Once existing laws are enforced and the border made peaceful, everyone in the country will be able to breathe easier and consider, without an air of clamor and crisis, what should be done next. What might that be? How about relax, see where we are, and absorb. Pass a small, clear law--say, one granting citizenship to all who serve two years in the armed forces--and then go have a Coke. Not everything has to be settled right away. Only controlling the border has to be settled right away.

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Eisenhower feared this very result; he warned in his Farewell Address that "public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite." Ordinary citizens--i.e., non-experts--would find the working of government to be incomprehensible, and would find themselves regarded as nothing more than sources of revenue or as interest groups to be bought off through subsidies. Under such circumstances government "of the people, by the people, and for the people" would no longer be possible. Nevertheless it is the logical outcome of progressivism.

"Pass a small, clear law--say, one granting citizenship to all who serve two years in the armed forces--and then go have a Coke."

Take one for the empire and get a green card and a case of Turtle Wax..

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