As noted in these columns last week, an extra 6,000 National Guard troops at any one time is not going to be remotely sufficient to deal with the security challenges already being posed by the enormous northward migration of 3million illegal immigrants into the United States per year from Mexico.

But the good news is that, after nearly five-and-a-half years in the White House, President George W. Bush has finally woken up to the scale of the security challenge facing the American people from the vast migration and has adopted, at least in principle, a sensible carrot and stick policy to deal with it.

The stick will be the dramatic boosting of border security by the building of a fence along the long U.S. land border with Mexico. And even if 6,000 National Guard troops at any one time are far too few to boost the manpower resources needed to defend that border, they are at least the first step in the right direction.

The second, equally crucial, step the president took was the carrot in his policy: he refused to yield to the hard-line forces in his own party and in border communities calling for massive repatriation policies on a far vaster scale than are currently being carried out.

These proposed hard-line policies are already popular at grassroots levels for very understandable human reasons in communities across the American Southwest. But the scale of the problem that has been allowed to develop over the past 40 years since the 1965 immigration act was passed demands caution and wisdom in responding the problems that already exist.

There is already a legal community of some 38 million Hispanic-Americans, the overwhelming majority of them from Mexico, within the United States. In addition, there are at least 12 million illegal immigrants believed to be in the country and, as noted above, their number is now growing by an extraordinary 3 million a year.

The vast majority of that illegal immigration works hard, is law-abiding and does jobs, ranging from looking after young children and the elderly, to working in the construction industry for low wages, that most other Americans do not care to do.

The greatest mistake, as officials in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security recognize, would be to crack down so hard on all illegal immigrants that that they would become fearful of and alienated from all U.S. law enforcement agencies. If that were to happen on a large scale, ruthless gangs of organized criminals would rapidly seek to take advantage of the situation and establish their own far-reaching control over entire communities of Hispanic-speaking recent illegal immigrants across the Southwest, even extending into other regions.

Historically, organized crime has always flourished among the most impoverished, defenseless and vulnerable communities of mass immigration throughout American history. The Martin Scorsese movie "Gangs of New York" gave a vivid, though if anything romanticized, account of the vicious Irish ethnic gangs that controlled areas of Manhattan for decades throughout the 19th century. Violent Irish gangs were powerful in the middle West Side of the city, the so-called "Hell's Kitchen" area, as late as the 1980s.

Later waves of immigration brought in the Italian Mafia, the Jewish Mob, the Chinese tongs and the Jamaican drug gangs. However fearsome they were at first, they tended to lose a lot of their power, community clout and terror after the first generation or so.

But the 1920s taught another lesson, the hard way, in the history of U.S. law enforcement. The era of Prohibition drove large elements of otherwise law-abiding Americans to take their pleasures, especially their illegal alcohol, from the gangs of organized crime who metastasized in power and influence as a result. In recent decades, Mexican-based drug cartels have flourished similarly by providing lucrative goods and services prohibited by law.

The challenge over the coming generation will be to acclimatize the latest great wave of immigrants from Mexico who have come north, as so many other immigrant waves did before them, believing in the American dream and seeking a better life for themselves and their children. Bush administration policymakers have recognized that challenge, at least in principle, with their new proposals.

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