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NPR ran a series of stories about the War on Drugs recently. The main idea being that the War on Drugs has failed because there has been too much focus on the supply and not enough focus on the demand.

They went through a number of different reasons why the focus is on the supply, and chief among them is that it’s simply easier to point at the tons and tons of drugs you’ve seized, and much harder to make a case for the drug addict that you’re helping wean off heroin. Makes sense from a marketing standpoint sure, but it seems people in government are actually getting serious about working on the demand side of the equation.

Another big topic of conversation lately has been immigration. First of all, I find it pretty hard to be “anti-immigration”. Give me your tired, weak and hungry! America is the place, always has been. I’m not sure what would’ve happened to my family had they not been allowed to stay. Or worse yet, how would my Great-Grandparents have liked getting forced back to their home countries, leaving their newly created families behind.

As I heard President Bush on the radio today, trying to turn syllables into words and sentences, I drew a parallel between the “War on Drugs” and the “War on Immigrants”.

It’s the same act. It’s all a show. The people who run the War on Drugs are just now realizing that it might be productive to work on the demand side, how long is it going to take for our politicians to realize that the real way to “solve” the “immigration problem” is to work on the demand?

All of these immigration raids, guest worker programs, visas and fences are all about trying to control the supply.

You can’t control the supply!

All you can do is control the demand. The demand in this case is the fact that given all its bumps and bruises, America is a pretty darn attractive place to live.

It’s still the place where you can work hard and make a decent living for yourself in relative safety. You can still hope that your children will be more successful than you are. There are opportunities everywhere for educational advancement. The market is free, the press is free, you are free here.

So really, as I see it, unless our politicians are willing to make America a less desirable place to live, unless they’re willing to make America less American, the immigrants will keep coming.

What other options are there? Help make other countries more desirable? Somehow wean ourselves off of cheap Wal-mart goods?

I’m not sure there are easy answers, but I’m also not sure we have a problem. We have a problem in a sense that as a country we’re worried about losing jobs at the bottom, and apparently not concerned with losing them at the top.

But a problem in a sense that we have people risking their lives to live here and work here and participate in our system?

No way.