Illegal immigration: now that's a hot-button topic. The right wing's flash points center on phrases like “control of our borders”; the left wing insists that the United States is a “nation of immigrants.” On this topic, as on almost all others, it's a yelling match. (My upcoming book, Why Liberals and Conservatives Clash, suggests a way out of such yelling matches.) But the clash misses the big picture: on this issue, as on so many others, the United States is part of a worldwide trend. Debating how to deal with illegal immigration as if we didn't realize it's going on everywhere condemns us to the point of view of ants trying to influence the weather.

The issue impacts the military in many ways. The military is caught between its natural conservatism -- stay tuned for an upcoming piece -- that disapproves of people (mostly Hispanic) entering the States illegally, and the fact that a great number of people in the enlisted ranks are Hispanics. It's ironic perhaps that in an all-volunteer military society's marginalized actually end up calling the shots. Similarly, we're told we need the cheap immigrant labor to pick our vegetables. If they dry up, we die.

This attitude, rather bizarrely, also affects the service academies, where Hispanic applicants, as a result of our effort to get “looks like the troops” officers, are direct-admitted with preferential (read: lower) standards merely because they check a box marked “Hispanic.” (The same is true for African-Americans and Native Americans.) Higher-ranked white applicants who are neither prior enlisted nor sports recruits have to compete for severely limited places through a Byzantine nomination system, and most end up being rejected. Such Hispanic applicants likely are the children of recent immigrants. Though they are U.S. citizens themselves, no one asks how their parents got here. On the other side of the border, they'd be merely more Mexicans: once here, they get seats with their names on them at the superpower's academies. Context is all.

The big picture is that the world as a whole is like the famous description of Brazil -- a classic Latin American elite vs. everybody else society -- as “one Switzerland surrounded by a hundred Biafras.” Biafra was short-lived country that tried in the l960s to break away from Nigeria, and became synonymous with abject poverty. Most of the world is more like Biafra than it is Switzerland. Unsurprisingly, those in the Biafras would rather be in the Switzerland. Probably that would have been true fifty years ago too, but until recently there wasn't an incessant barrage of television to show them what they're missing, nor globalization to sell the Western lifestyle (and the artery-clogging trash of McDonald's) in every corner of the globe. Natural or political boundaries kept the rich from the poor. Now these have largely fallen; any attempt to cross the remaining boundaries is worth it if the rich countries will employ them or put them on a dole.

Sub-Saharan Africans set out across the treacherous hundreds of miles of open ocean from Mauritania to the Spanish Canary Islands. Many drown. They're merely obeying the inexorable laws of monetary osmosis: poor people go to rich countries, because they can make more money there, assuming they arrive alive. Usually they send it back home. The Dominican Republic gets as much money from family members sending back dollars as they do from their largest real earner, tourism, rich Westerners coming to them. Most Dominicans got to New York by crossing a narrow strait to Puerto Rico (yes, it's illegal) and hopping a domestic flight.

Liberals claim illegal immigration is a win-win situation: they do work we won't, and are happy with wages that seem huge to them, if low to us. But it's the conservatives -- deeply suspicious of people flowing across borders the crossers simply ignore -- who have the more on-target impulse: they just feel invaded. When, they wonder, will it ever end?

Conservatives are spot-on with this fear. It's not as if the supply of poor people will dry up, or that they'll stop coming at some magical equilibrium when the rich world has enough cheap labor. Keep in mind too that the children of the immigrants aren't going to find low-end wages attractive: they're no longer comparing these with the home country. (Does the next generation of illegals educate to higher-end jobs? The jury is still out on that one.) So that means always more of them coming here to pluck the chickens and mulch the lawns. And it's untrue, as the free-market fat cats and the people who want a cheap chicken breast would have us believe that too much is never too much. They can't all move here, especially not at once.

Because the poor world wants so badly to come to the rich, however, we can't wake up one morning and decide to put a stop to it. The pressure is too worldwide, and too intense: the result would be an explosion. Our solution lies somewhere in the middle. We need to be thinking in terms of how much is right. That means right for us; not for them. This isn't charity, and they're the ones who want to come here. Temporary visas for workers? Germany tried this with the Turks to get low-income workers in the post-war years; the result has been uncomfortable at best and disastrous at worst.

We hear that lawns can't be mulched without Mexicans. Similarly, we hear that the volunteer military nowadays can't do without the economic low-end volunteers attracted to its package despite the dangers. It's time we started acknowledging that, even if there are benefits to this state of affairs both in the military and in our country as a whole, there are also drawbacks. And then we might be able to discuss with cooler heads which outweighs which. Would Americans do the dirty work jobs if no one did these? Would Americans take this work if wages were raised? Given that the illegals can go to any hospital's emergency room and be treated, are they a drain on our system in excess of what they put in? These are a form of questions like, Is it really wise to swap cheap Christmas decorations (and everything else) from China for a huge trade deficit, which they in turn finance with the dollars we give them? This too is part of a global situation, not a local one. The answers to these questions have to be arrived at by analysis, not by yelling louder than the other side.