Get it right: It’s about ILLEGAL immigration, Mr. President

Throughout the debate over Arizona's new law to enforce current U.S. laws on illegal immigration, President Barack Obama consistently miscasts the issue.

Purposely, he tries to frame the debate around the civil rights of "American citizens and law-abiding immigrants."

That, of course, is not what's going on.

Arizona is under siege by a broken border that leaks as many as a million Mexicans a year into Arizona. They enter the country illegally. From the get-go, they are not "law-abiding immigrants."

But to bolster his point of view, he almost always drops the modifier "illegal" in front of immigrant and it serves only to confuse the issue.

Consider his little talk on Cinco de Mayo this week. He lectures the American people thus:

"You can't start singling out people because of who they look like or how they talk or how they dress. You can't turn law-abiding American citizens and law-abiding immigrants into subjects of suspicion and abuse. You can't divide the American people that way. That is not the answer."

OK. I'm open to hearing about the "answer" is, according to this president. But we're not going to find the right answer if we don't frame the question correctly.

This is not about turning "law-abiding immigrants into subjects of suspicion and abuse." This is about stemming the tide of illegal immigration and what to do with a population of people who have managed to live for years in this country ILLEGALLY.

It is a tough issue, for which I don't think this president (as with so many of the problems of the day) has an answer.

There's another sidebar topic on this Arizona issue that has got me steamed. It's the propensity of the Obama crowd to compare Arizona to Nazi Germany. There could not be a more misapplied comparison.

I'm going to write on this topic in Sunday's Review-Journal. As always, I'll appreciate your readership.