There's something about a demonstration of about a half-million people that concentrates the mind...here I am, depressed about life in general, about the nasty trend of the blogosphere towards hate and incivility, about how the local college hoops team will likely win the national title playing the most negative and dispiriting style of funsucking strategy imaginable, and I wake up to the reminder that political change does, in fact, ultimately emerge from the streets, and not from someone's laptop.

The thing people seem to forget about the whole immigration debate is that the laws that are being broken are civil, not criminal. The proposed laws focused on punishing so-called "illegal aliens" are an attempt to substitute a malum prohibitum code (that is to say, conduct that is against the law because it is against the law) with a malum per se version (ie., conduct that is illegal because it is wrong). For most of us, malum per se conduct is self-policing: it is not so much an issue of adhering to laws against rape, theft, and murder as it is following the morals one is taught from an early age not to engage in that activity in the first place. Malum prohibitum conduct is not like that; if we can get away with speeding or parking our cars at an expired parking meter, we will do so, even though we acknowledge the good public policy reasons for why such laws are on the books in the first place.

Several millenia of homo sapiens migrating from one area to another to find a better life will not be changed by whatever legal technicalities Congress enacts, and we simply don't have the resources to do what's necessary to arm our borders with Mexico. As long as America has jobs and wealth, and Central America does not, people will cross northward, our immigration laws not withstanding. The only reform worth debating is one that deals with reality, the millions of undocumented people already here, and the vital contributions they make to our society.