What should we do about illegal immigration?

I don't know the answer, but I'll tell you how I lean.

I would like to see us as a country find a way to provide for illegal immigrants to stay but still have them pay a reasonable penalty.

Such a solution would give honor to the law and show mercy to the immigrants, whose situations are so varied and so many. It's not an easy, black-and-white, "they disobeyed, so get 'em out of here" issue. There's a lot of exploitation. We've benefited a lot from these people, etc.

As I've looked at both sides it seems that we could probably come up with a way to acknowledge that it is against the law (and we're not going to say that breaking the law doesn't matter), and yet we're not going to say that it's a simple and easy solution to try and ship 20 million of them back to Mexico. It's not going to work that way.

Just like illegal parking is against the law and we are charged a reasonable fee when we're caught, so too we should charge a reasonable penalty for illegal immigrants but one that doesn't require them to return to their home country.

I don't know if that will work, but that is the direction my heart leans toward.