You just returned from a two week vacation. As soon as you enter your house, your feet slosh-splash into two inches of water. Oh, no! Your plumbing has sprung a leak! What is the first thing you do (after the weeping and gnashing of teeth)?

1. Spend months (maybe longer, to get it right!) designing better plumbing
2. Pump out the water
3. Turn off the water
4. Repair the leak
5. Perform other repairs (replace flooring, check for mold damage, …)
6. Devise an approach and process to deal with future water leaks
7. Define more stringent water quality standards
8. Yell at the contractor that built your house for his shoddy work
9. Yell at the insurance company for its meager coverage
10. All of the above, all at once!

These may all represent valid or at least somewhat reasonable responses, but which comes first? If you picked #3, turn off the water, followed by #4, repair the leak, you might appreciate why many (reportedly conservative) folks concerned with immigration scream “secure the border first.” If turning off the water also seems like common sense to you, why has the debate gotten stuck on #10, all off the above, all at once?

It seems as if, by dogpiling the problem to the point of making it insoluble, someone wants to keep us sloshing in two inches of water. But let’s assign purer motives…

The elusive full solution

Perhaps we want to solve the problem all at once because it persists even after we turn off the water. What to do with those two inches of the stuff warping our beautiful wood flooring and soaking our (no longer) plush carpet? OK, so let’s say we come up with a viable way to collect it. What then? Shove it into the pipe and pump it back to where it came from? Lay down piping that returns the water to its source? That seems hardly practical. Flush it down the drain? Maybe, but where I live (drought-plagued California), water has become a precious resource. Maybe we should save the water to irrigate our garden.

Here we should note the analogy stretches to the breaking point on at least one key consideration. If immigrants are like water, we might note those coming in illegally are not in every case causing damage. In fact, we might note the majority of them, while placing some strain on our systems (employment, schools, and health care, to name three), are also contributing in non-damaging and, in fact, rather constructive (literally, in many cases) ways. If the sprung leak had watered some of our in-house plants and rinsed off our dirty tile floors, our faulty plumbing analogy might come closer to representing how illegal immigration impacts us. In many cases — arguably, the majority of the time — we derive a benefit from it. This further highlights the impracticality of sending the spilled water back to its source. We would be left with a void for the useful purposes it serves.

This brings us to a key observation: water is not in and of itself evil. In fact, water is a good, necessary thing. A precious thing! The issue here isn’t with the water itself, but with the unplanned, disorderly way in which it streamed into our house. Clearly a solution that prevents water from ever flowing into our house again isn’t what we want or need. Yes, we want to avoid leaks and spills, but we still require water. In fact, we can’t live without it.

Maybe at this point, with the water shut off, and the errant water collected, we should take a deep breath and work through some of those other multiple choice options.

We should ask ourselves whether simply repairing the leak will suffice. More than likely, the plumbing popped because it is old and in need of refurbishment. Perhaps we need to switch from galvanized to copper piping. Maybe we need to layout new piping in a way that better distributes water pressure, thus placing lower stresses on joints and fittings, thereby minimizing the risk of future bursts. This might also be a good time to incorporate improved water filtering, should the quality of water in my city be in question. (At the risk of talking down, in our analogy, this relates to an antiquated, strained immigration system and its accompanying ungainly policies, much in need of refurbishment.)

Why aren’t we thinking of immigration this way? Well, maybe a few clear-headed folks are trying. Unfortunately their practical thinking drowns, year upon year, election cycle after cycle under the rhetoric of those who demand taller walls and deportation forces, and those shouting back about racism and discrimination. Not to mention those deriving political gain by perpetuating the roiling schism.

Insert sigh here… If only we could apply a level-headed engineering solution… Heck, just call the plumber.