Ok, one last article about illegal aliens.   The core faultline - can Illegal Aliens be deterred or must they be coopted?   David Brooks, the NYT's lone conservative, paints a picture in favor of cooption and thus IRP:

Imagine a person 10 times as determined as you are. Picture a guy who will wade across rivers, brave 120-degree boxcars and face vicious smugglers and murderous vigilantes — all to get a job picking fruit for 10 hours a day. That person is the illegal immigrant. Let's call him Sam. This whole immigration debate is about him, the choices he faces and the way he responds.

One thing we know about Sam: he will get here. Between 1986 and 1998, Congress increased the Border Patrol's budget sixfold. Over that time the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. doubled, to eight million. Getting across that border is Sam's shot at a decent future. Maybe his whole family depends upon him. He will not be herded away like a lamb.

At the moment, Sam lives in the shadows of society. But this week, President Bush proposed an immigration reform plan that would offer him a new set of choices.

Under the Bush plan, Sam could become a visible member of society with legal documentation. He could get a driver's license. He could benefit from worker protection laws, and possibly see his wages rise. He could open a bank account, which would let him ship money back home without having to pay huge fees. As Dan Griswold of the Cato Institute has shown, he would be much more likely to invest in himself through worker training

There are a LOT of details that need to be nailed down.  

Observors of all stripes have noted that the illegal alien problem breaks up the traditional left/right American political spectrum (which has always had dubious predictive value).   I bet that at least a few of the NYT's core liberal readers believe that conservatives are folks with a certain mean-spiritedness in their hearts.   These guys are likely quite surprised by Brooks' angle of attack which focuses on addressing despair, anguish, and pain of the illegal immigrant.