Interesting article in the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion Journal by Daniel Henninger on What it is to be an American:

The American “community” taking matters into its own hands, the vigilantism of the Minuteman Project, went out of fashion in the U.S. about 50 years ago. Nor is there any chance, as some Republicans desire, that a Congress in our time is going to enact an employer hiring ban whose implicit goal is to force many millions of people to leave the country.

There are at least 12.5 million illegal Hispanic-origin workers in the U.S. now. If the opponents want at least 6 million of them out of the U.S., they should write up legislation that will achieve that goal, tell the American people that this is indeed the explicit purpose and then let voters convey their desires to the Members of Congress.

If expulsion is not the goal but if “unearned” citizenship remains intolerable (and politically, that may well be so), then the one feasible option is for the political system to create a temporary guest-worker program that rises and falls with the tides of the U.S. economy.

Personally, I think expulsion should be the goal, because I don’t believe that the guest-worker program would ever fall with the tide…but would only continue to rise.

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Heading Right disagrees with Henninger’s premise that conservatives don’t offer solutions, just complaints:

What do conservatives want? Build the border fence that was passed last year, bolster the Border Patrol, and fix the visa-regulation system so we can reliably track violators, as was mandated for completion by 2005. Once that’s done, then let’s talk normalization.