Only one week before a Time magazine cover story breathlessly informed the nation what the nation has long known—that America's borders are grotesquely out of control and getting worse—the Bush administration's border security chief told the nation to forget about the borders, there's nothing we can do.

But what Homeland Security Undersecretary Asa Hutchinson told the Washington Times last week is hardly surprising, given this administration's indifference to the immigration crisis.

"It's not realistic to say we're going to reduce that number," Mr. Hutchinson told a group of editors at the Washington Times last week, speaking of the 8 million illegal immigrants he says are here. (Others say as many as 13 or 14 million, but leave that point aside; what difference does it make if the federal government doesn't have a clue about exactly how many are here if it won't or can't do anything about any of them?) [Rounding up all illegals 'not realistic' By Jerry Seper The Washington Times]

"We don't set goals like that. Our goal is to enforce the law as we see violations of the law."

Great, but with even a piddling 8 million illegals here, "we" are doing a pretty lousy job of it.

Mr. Hutchinson, whose job includes running the government's agencies for border and transportation security, also had lots of excuses as to why the government can't do what it has a constitutional duty to do—protect the nation from foreign invasion.

"But I don't think America has the will," he added. "I think they have too much compassion to tell our law-enforcement people to go out there and uproot those 8 million here—some of whom might have been here 8 or 12 years, who got kids here that are American citizens—and to send them out of the country."

This, despite that fact that the ill-conceived amnesty for illegals that Mr. Hutchinson's boss proposed last winter fell as flat as a tortilla pancake the day he proposed it.

Has anyone in this administration learned anything about what Americans really think about illegal immigration?

One who has learned is Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado, who is also chairman of the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus in the House and has done more to push serious immigration control than any other public figure in the nation. Mr. Tancredo came close to suggesting that Mr. Hutchinson ought to be fired. "If the statements attributed to him are accurate," the Colorado congressman said, "then this administration has got some major problems."

Mr. Hutchinson told a congressional aide that the Times had "misrepresented" what he said, but he never told the Times that. [Tancredo presses White House on control of border, By Jerry Seper, September 15, 2004]

The blunt truth is that this administration, like the national political elite it reflects, does not have the will to deal with the illegal immigration problem or the larger and more serious problem of mass legal immigration.

The reason it does not have the will is that it has forgotten what it means to be a nation—and shows no interest in remembering.

The healthy leadership of a nation puts the interests of the nation it leads ahead of the interests and preferences of the illegal aliens who have invaded it. Mr. Hutchinson, bubbling about "compassion," is more worried about "uprooting" the invaders and hurting their feelings.

But since they came here illegally and remain here at the expense of the nation, serious compassion—compassion that is just and not merely mawkish slop or a politically expedient slogan—should be for the victims of the invasion.

"I don't know that we've arrived at a consensus and, sure, that makes a difference," Mr. Hutchinson told the Times. "You can define that as political will. You also can describe it in terms of whether we've debated it sufficiently and drawn our thoughts together."

"It," presumably, is immigration, and as a matter of fact we have not debated it quite enough.

As any writer who favors stronger immigration control can tell you, what usually gets published and promoted is Open Borders propaganda.

Those who publish and promote it don't want a "debate" because they know they'd lose.

But as for the "political will" to start the arduous process of enforcing elementary border control, that really should not be a problem for an administration that has already fought two wars half-way around the planet and set up the most massive internal security apparatus in American history.

Just what exactly does Mr. Hutchinson think would give us the will?

Mr. Hutchinson, if he really said what he is reported to have said and what he has never denied saying, should be fired at once, but more importantly, the American people need to wonder just whose side this administration is really on—that of the nation it claims to represent, or the aliens who have invaded it?

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Sam Francis [email him] is a nationally syndicated columnist. A selection of his columns, America Extinguished: Mass Immigration And The Disintegration Of American Culture, is now available from Americans For Immigration Control. Click here for Sam Francis' website. Click here to order his monograph, Ethnopolitics: Immigration, Race, and the American Political Future.