Clearly, our country needs to address the issue of illegal immigration. However, the federal government, not the states, must take the lead on this issue. We need leadership in Washington that can reach compromise on the issues involving immigrants already living and working in this country; the security of our nation's borders; and the process that future immigrants will follow to enter this country legally and pursue their dream of a happy, healthy, productive life for their families.

If Congress abdicates its responsibility and squanders the opportunity to deal decisively with immigration abuses, we will have a bizarre, imperfect patchwork of state immigration laws that will adversely serve our nation as a whole and ultimately fail to address the myriad of immigration-related issues. State immigration statutes will be a hodgepodge that no one -- especially immigrants – will be able to understand.

We have already seen how this issue is being used as a political ploy in Missouri, with the introduction of Senate Bill 348, this past legislative session. Called the “Missouri Omnibus Immigration Act,” its aim was to deny housing and employment to undocumented workers, bar them from attending all public universities, deny them any public assistance of any kind and empower local police to enforce immigration laws. Dissension among the Republican members derailed the effort. As a tradeoff, a constitutional amendment, HJR 7, requiring only English in official transactions was rammed through in the final hours of the session. Because state law already requires only English officially, the sole purpose of the amendment is to get certain voters to the polls in November 2008.

Without federal legislation, the mishmash of state statutes will ultimately have to be clarified by the courts. This will likely sentence judges to being labeled "activist" by conservatives who failed to solve the problem in the first place.

Senator Joan Bray