"A twinge of resentment"

There was a good AP article that I must've missed yesterday about legal immigrants who feel like they're being marginalized in the debate over illegal immigration reform. I can't say I blame them, seeing as how they're trying to do things the right way, and the US Senate is basically throwing the door open to lawbreakers and saying, "Come on in!"

Here's how it begins:

Working with illegal immigrants every day in a suburban Atlanta bank, Carlos Carbonell knows exactly where to go to buy a fake green card for his wife. Sometimes he thinks it would be much easier.

His wife, Valentina, has been stuck in their native Caracas, Venezuela, for four years because of backlogs in processing her green card application.

Carbonell believes in reforming U.S. immigration policy, but he and other legal immigrants who have been playing by the rules feel forgotten in the debate over possible amnesty for most of the estimated 12 million immigrants here illegally.

"They are putting as a priority illegal immigration, and legal immigrants are left out of the loop. It's the curse of doing things right," he said. "They think that the legal ones can wait -- hey!"

Even though they have loyalty to their immigrant origins, many legal immigrants also feel a twinge of resentment toward others who have broken the law, and they fear illegal migrants could complicate their own quest for citizenship.

It's an excellent article, and it touches on some of the things that I wrote about here earlier this month. Read the whole thing.