The latest Congressional hearing on immigration reform was chaired yesterday by U.S. Sen. Wayne Allard, a Republican from Colorado. Allard spent a bunch of taxpayer money staging a "field hearing" of the Senate Budget Committee in Aurora, Colorado. The topic? Ironically, the "cost" of illegal immigration. No senator on the committee other than Allard bothered to turn up.

I've got an idea for Sen. Allard's the next Congressional hearing on the virtues and dangers of immigration. Call Gen. John Abizaid, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, to testify. Ask him if he could fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan without the 33,000 non-U.S. citizens currently serving in the military. After all, it is Hispanic soldiers who, according to research by demographers at the University of Pennsylvania, are doing a disproportionately high percentage of the dying in Iraq.