Mistake vs negligence? Those are the choices of judgement you have to offer?
You're right to this degree. If one wants to speculate on past events, we could have prevented the current turmoil long ago by cracking down on the people coming over the border, and the Americans who employed them. But, why do I get the sense that they would have been just as angry, and would have expressed the same sense of ill-usage about it then as they do now?
What's really going on is that we share 2000 mile borders with 2 countries. One country's people permit terrible government, and so, many of said people use our country as an escape route from said terrible government. The other country is fine, thank you very much, and doesn't feel inclined to slip into the US illegally en masse.
How happy would illegal immigrants be if we had refused to employ them right from the start, refused to allow them access to education, food, housing, health care, and ran them out of town on a rail as soon as we found out they were here? Would they have admired and respected us for our actions? At the time, with work needing to be done and willing hands to do it, would we have been better off ethically or morally for having turned our backs? Does the fact that we benefitted as well mean we're more responsible than the people on the other side of the equation?
See, what you have here is a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. What I'm hearing is, we are obligated to provide all of the above, plus citizenship, because our borders march alongside Mexico's and we haven't decisively repelled them in the past. If we had, we would have been labelled greedy, inhumane monsters who refused to help out our poorer neighbors. Because we had a don't ask, don't tell relationship instead, we are labelled greedy, inhumane monsters who refuse to help out our poorer neighbors.
You no doubt are convinced I'm a racist at this point, but I don't have any problem with immigration. I don't have a problem with offering legal immigrant status to Mexicans, or any other nationality. But, I absolutely oppose the idea that illegal workers are entitled to jump the line, and that their illegal presence in this country entitles them to do anything other than apply for US citizenship like any other person seeking to emigrate here.
I have a friend in my workplace, who came here from India several years ago, legally. He has been working ever since he got here, and has applied for visas for the rest of his family to join him. He's been waiting for nearly seven years now. Every month, I log into the National Visa Center's site while he peers anxiously over my shoulder, so he can see the monthly visa bulletin, and see how close they are getting to processing his family's petition for visas. I don't support ANYONE's claim that they have a right to cut ahead of his family's place in line. He has done everything he was legally supposed to do to get himself and his family here, he is an asset to our workplace, and he is now an old man. If 11 million illegal workers get to lay claim to the federal government's time in order to get their visa requests processed on the fast track, my friend will never get to live his own long-awaited American dream. I can't and won't support such an injustice.