....but I'm off the mind that we can't even begin having this discussion unless we seal the borders.  Right away, that puts me at odds with a very large percentage of this community.

But assuming we are able to seal the border with either a real or mechanical fence, it will be very hard to balance the interests of our economy with the influx of immigrants allowed to enter legally.  Theoretically, a precise distribution of immigration visas could allocate a useful quotient of laborers to every sector of the economy while avoiding endemic suppression of working-class wage levels.  But this would be all but impossible to pull off given the disparity of the lobbying forces each industry has.  Certainly, construction and agribusiness would be in a breathless fury if their pipeline of impoverished immigrant labor slowed to a trickle...and the misinformation campaign they unleashed on lawmakers and the public would convince them of the need to keep the cheap labor trough full for the barons.

It would ultimately be a learning curve and require a few years before the process ran as effectively as we'd like, but as I see every working-class person I know undermined by low-wage labor from south of the border, I am certain that the status quo is unacceptable...and several of the provisions of McCain-Kennedy would likely make the situation worse.