"President Bush hoped to tone down and sober up the immigration fight Monday night. But it amounted to a soft “shush” at WrestleMania. 

The most interesting part of this political and ideological cage match is that few of the usual labels have much utility. President Bush and Senator Kennedy agree on a lot. Howard Dean and Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, can sound like conservative Republicans in their demands to close the border. Weekly Standard editor and Fox News sage Bill Kristol declares himself a “liberal” on immigration and “soft” on illegal immigration. Both the Weekly Standard and the editors of the Wall Street Journal consider National Review to be part of the mob of “yahoos” trying, in Kristol’s words, to drive the GOP “off a cliff.”

So this seems like a propitious time to ask: What if illegal immigrants were crack? 

It’s not such a crazy comparison, by the way. There’s a reason why the drug war and illegal immigration have similar scripts, even though the actors reading the lines change.

The overwhelming majority of drugs entering this country cross the U.S.-Mexican border. Indeed, in the 1990s, to the extent that the debate over building a wall along the border got any traction, it stemmed from the war on drugs, not a war on illegal immigration. The steel fence constructed between San Diego and Tijuana—which works quite well, by the way—was built to stop drug traffickers, not gardeners.

Meanwhile, labels like “Left” and “Right,” “liberal” and “conservative” don’t get you very far when debating....

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