The US media led by Fox News and Lou Dobbs on CNN are foaming at the mouth today (1 May) about the Mexican "illegal immigrant" rallies in the US. By all accounts they have been huge.

We Americans need to face up to the one single point that complicates this entire issue - we have to get over the idea that if you're born in America you belong in America and automatically get citizenship. No US government, federal or State, is going to deport US citizens and - if they are children - their parents, whether their parents arrived legally or not. So the No.1 priority is to phase that law out. There should be a 10-month phase-out period from an announced date. After that the US will have the immigration policy that every other country in the world that is a magnet to immigrants now has - a child born in the US would be entitled to US citizenship only if his parents are in the US legally.

The next step is to grant an amnesty to every "illegal immigrant" member of every family unit (i.e. mum, dad and the kids) that includes a US citizen born in the US. Then we can decide, probably on a case-by-case basis, who gets deported.

At the same time, tighten the border - but let's not build a Berlin Wall.