Columnist: Keeping American citizenship valuable

Silvio Laccetti, a social sciences professor at Stevens Institute of Technology, offers some common-sense advice on the illegal immigration problems:

First, we must close the borders, enforce immigration laws, and set strict limits reflecting national needs for new immigrants. To show the absurdity of claims that such measures are motivated by racism, consider that perhaps a third of the world's population would like to immigrate to our shores for economic reasons; Mexicans simply have the advantage of being able to walk across the border.

Is letting them do so not discriminatory toward Guatemalans, Hondurans, Peruvians, and Paraguayans living much farther away? And people from Benin, Belarus, Bosnia, Borneo, and Bulgaria don't show up much at all, do they?

Second, we should enable the 10 million lacking legal status to become full citizens, but on the condition that they earn citizenship. If qualified and of appropriate age, let them serve in the military for basic training plus one year. Only then would a child born in America to immigrants sans status become a citizen through parentage. Longer enlistments could offer high-tech training and English-language fluency, enabling more contributions to the republic.

Read his full op-ed, "Keeping American citizenship valuable," at the newspaper's website.