If “ignorance is bliss” and “romance is bliss” then romance must be ignorance, right?  No, I don’t think so.  It’s a faulty syllogism.  Right now, a lot of people are concerned about illegal immigration.  They think a rising crime rate is a problem of illegal immigration.  They think immigrants are taking jobs legal Americans could otherwise have.  They think they are overcrowding neighborhoods, draining government resources for education and healthcare.  Are these observations valid? 

Consider who settled Georgia, among other of the original 13 colonies which had a large contingent of convicts from their native land–England.  They worked out OK in the end.  If illegal immigrants have fake social security cards, with bogus numbers, who gets the benefit of any FICA taxes collected from paychecks?  Those dollars go into the U.S. Treasury for the benefit of the Social Security fund.  What jobs do these people take?  The ones no one else wants.  But shouldn’t we care that they are illegal?  Yes, but the whole issue is an overblown distraction, a red herring, an easy target at which to point.  So what?  It avoids thinking and acting on real problems facing America.  A failure to resolve this overblown problem then becomes yet another source of frustration with the government and politicians–avoiding personal responsibility for one’s own success or failure, one’s own happiness.