It’s particularly strong when many of those people live in America’s shadows, illegal immigrants who face deportation because they emerge from the shadows to stand up for themselves.

I don’t care what anybody says, the vast majority of these illegal immigrants are among the hardest working people in this country.

Rodolfo Urias earns $60 a day building homes in Tucson. Six days a week he walks to the corner of Ninth Avenue and 22nd Street in Tucson, looking for work making $60 a day in construction. He works ten hours a day. Six bucks an hour and he’s proud of his labors. The money goes to his family in Ciudad Obregon, in southern Sonora.

I worked as a landscaper in the 1990s. I earned $10 an hour and benefits doing a job that is half as hard. I’d rather mow lawns in Northern California than spread tar on a roof in Tucson any day.

Paying those kinds of wages, why would somebody pay a U.S. citizen?

For those with legal paying jobs, the problems are greater. Federal and state taxes are deducted from their paychecks the same as yours and mine. But when they retire, they won’t see a penny of that money. A fake Social Security card takes care of some of your resident problems but those $3,000-4,000 cut from your checks every year only boost up the pensions of legal residents.

What is the solution?

Some bills under consideration would criminalize the illegal immigrants while others would build a wall along the entire border. Others would establish guest worker programs to control the flow of immigrants.

The way the current situation is, the border is under control. A certain number of illegal immigrants cross the border. Half a million make it. The Border Patrol makes 1 million arrests, many of those simply the same person who has tried again and again and again.

In Altar, Sonora, last week, I ran across a family with a cute two-year-old girl. The family would cross through Sasabe on their way to Los Angeles.

The little girl smiled at my camera, drooling a little bit of Pepsi from the corner of her mouth.

“Do you worry about the child?” I asked her mother as she wiped her daughter’s face.

“Yes, but I have no other choice,” she said, giving a common answer.

Cut to the next day.

There’s also the problem of this guy, an illegal immigrant stopped by the U.S. Border Patrol on Arizona 286 the next day.

He carried a toy gun under the passenger seat. The agent only saw the gun’s grip. He ordered the man out, handcuffing him and calling for back up for what he thought was a real weapon.

Agent Jim Hawkins, a public information officer who was taking myself and a foreign correspondent out with Border Patrol, pulled up behind the agent’s SUV, red and blue lights flashing.

A toy gun, I thought.

Then I saw the gun up close. It was the same size and shape as Hawkins Glock .40.

Other than the orange tip, how would you tell the difference? In the area the tattooed, glaring young man was captured in, a group of 35 to 40 bandits have been prowling the border at Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, mugging the immigrants, raping the women and stealing the people’s money. This year alone, four immigrants have been found shot in six separate shootings, says refuge manager Mitch Ellis.

This border both works well and is a dangerous catastrophe, subjecting immigrants and residents to all manner of horrors, from painful death by dehydration to area children stumbling over their corpses.

And so, 500,000 people protest in Los Angeles against the criminalization of illegal immigrants Another 500 or so in Tucson the day before.

Don’t build a wall; don’t throw these people back across the border, that is not the solution, it is argued.

And they are correct.

Neither is the current, sorry state of affairs.

Senator John McCain and Congressman Jim Kolbe have that guest-worker program idea.

It doesn’t sound as tough-talking as Republican James Sensenbrenner’s ocean-to-ocean wall so I don’t know what the final reaction will be.

But we do know this: so far, a $1.6 billion Border Patrol has not been enough to quell the flow of illegal immigrants and the opportunistic crime that chases them and hurts everyone.

Can it reasonably be expected that a wall will stop the illegal immigrants?

I asked Oscar Macedo the question as he walked with a group of 92 other illegal immigrants the Border Patrol captured last Saturday by Caballo Loco Ranch. (The numbers seem astounding but it’s a normal day.)

A Border Patrol helicopter roared overhead in the blue sky, a dry wind shook the mesquite trees around us.

Macedo stopped for a second, looking at me.

“The question isn”t whether a wall or anything else will stop the illegals,” he said. “Mas bien, do you want to stop us?”

It’s a fair question.