Unabashedly Unhyphenated: What does it mean that your first act on entering a country is breaking its laws?

Peggy Noonan hits a home run! I hope our Congresscritters read and consider what she has to say on the immigration issue. She's one of the few writers out there with an audience who has this issue figured out. She appears to be in touch with her "American Kernel;" that is, she understands that a unique and historically important culture began to form very early in the American colonial period. The hardships of frontier and geographic isolation from the nearby foreign influences common in the rest of the world soon produced a people who were more "American" than they were anything else.

For those not born here to citizen parents, it should be an honor, a coveted privilege, to be allowed to remain here. Anyone who breaks our law to get here is not worthy of the privilege that is "being called American."

OpinionJournal - Peggy Noonan

"What does it mean that your first act on entering a country--your first act on that soil--is the breaking of that country's laws? What does it suggest to you when that country does nothing about your lawbreaking because it cannot, or chooses not to? What does that tell you? Will that make you a better future citizen, or worse? More respecting of the rule of law in your new home, or less?

If you assume or come to believe that that nation will not enforce its own laws for reasons that are essentially cynical, that have to do with the needs of big business or the needs of politicians, will that assumption or belief make you more or less likely to be moved by that country, proud of that country, eager to ally yourself with it emotionally, psychologically and spiritually?

When you don't earn something or suffer to get it, do you value it less highly? If you value it less highly, will you bother to know it, understand it, study it? Will you bother truly to become part of it? "