The New York Times once again takes all of us backwards, Mexican-hating rubes (who think immigration laws ought to be enforced and immigration law-breakers deported rather than rewarded) to task for our Neanderthal ways.

The nation certainly sounds as if it’s in an angry place on immigration.

A major Senate reform bill collapsed in rancor in June, and every effort to revive innocuous bits of it, like a bill to legalize exemplary high school graduates, has been crushed. Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York hatched a plan to let illegal immigrants earn driver’s licenses — and steamrollered into the Valley of Death. Asked if she supported Mr. Spitzer, Senator Hillary Clinton tied herself in knots looking for the safest answer.

The Republican presidential candidates, meanwhile, are doggedly out-toughing one another — even Rudolph Giuliani, who once defended but now disowns the immigrants who pulled his hard-up city out of a ditch. A freshman Democratic representative, Heath Shuler of North Carolina, has submitted an enforcement bill bristling with border fencing and punishments. Representative Tom Tancredo, Republican of Colorado, for whom restricting immigration is the first, last and only issue, says he will not run again when his term expires next year. I have done all I can, he says, like some weary gunslinger covered in blood and dust.

The natural allies of immigrants have been cowed into mumbling or silent avoidance. The Democrats’ chief strategist, Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, went so far as to declare immigration the latest “third rail of American politics.” This profile in squeamishness was on full display at the Democratic presidential debate last week in Las Vegas, when Wolf Blitzer pressed the candidates for yes-or-no answers on driver’s licenses and Mrs. Clinton, to her great discredit, said no.

This year’s federal failure will not be undone until 2009 at the earliest, while states and local governments will continue doing their own thing, creating a mishmash of immigration policies, most of them harsh and shortsighted. But the wilderness of anger into which Mr. Tancredo helped lead America is not where the country has to be on this vitally important issue, nor where it truly is.

The problem, of course, with this editorial is that it presumes bad faith on the part of those who disagree with its open-borders orientation. Having dispensed with the notion that one's opponents have anything of value to say, the author of the editorial is then able to insist that there really is no other solution but the one proposed in the editorial.

The other problem, of course is that the folks in the editorial suites at the NYT don't have to deal with the real problems of illegal immigration on a daily basis. Those of us closer to the border do. The county I live in just spent $100 million on unreimbursed medical care for illegal immigrants -- about $25 for every man, woman, and child in the county Add in the costs of educating illegal immigrant kids, incarcerating illegal immigrant criminals, etc, and you can see where the local costs are astronomical. The impact on our lives of the flood of illegal immigrants is simply beyond the understanding of northeastern limousine liberals -- and that is why Americans along the border are demanding what the editors view as harsh and inhumane policies that in reality amount to nothing more than insistence that the laws of this country be enforced rather than changed to make the lives of the lawbreakers easier.

It has, of course, been a couple of generations since the New York Times spoke for anyone except the pampered elite (if it ever did). And given that it is so out of contact with what real Americans think, feel, and believe, I'm not surprised that it would take the positions it does. After all, who will water the gardens, mow the lawns, and clean the pools of those who think that the New York Times editorial page is latter-day scripture?

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