“There isn’t really immigration law in this country,” a Pennsylvania immigration lawyer named Craig Trebilcock declared at a press conference on Wednesday in New York’s Chinatown. “There is only immigration politics.”

Trebilcock was flanked by thirty-one Chinese men who arrived in the United States in 1993, on a freighter, The Golden Venture, that had borne them two thirds of the way around the world. They served four years in an American prison for entering the country illegally, only to be released “on parole,” in 1997, and ushered into the ambiguous legal loophole they still occupy today. Though they physically reside in this country, have wives and children and own property and businesses, the men are not technically allowed to be here. They are active and productive stakeholders in the American economy, yet at the whim of federal officials they could receive deportation orders any day, requesting that they abandon their homes, businesses and American-born children, and report with “44 pounds of luggage,” to be shipped back to China.

The plight of the Golden Venture passengers is emblematic of a pathological bipolarity in America’s posture toward emigrants from other shores. Dating at least back to the 19th century, immigration policy has torqued between the economic demand for low-wage labor and the political fear that throwing wide the gates to the unwashed hordes will erode our national security, our social services, and our cultural identity. Recent congressional proposals for an overhaul of immigration policy neatly capture this national schizophrenia, and any notion that a happy compromise could be achieved between the Senate’s more forgiving bill (reflecting the economic demand), and the House’s more draconian one (reflecting the political fear), underestimates just how polarized these competing instincts have become.

The first Chinese emigrants to America came in the mid-nineteenth century, aggressively recruited and welcomed on their arrival as a source of cheap labor to build the trans-American railway and dig for gold in the mines of California. But once completed, that railway carried thousands of young white men west in search of work, the Chinese had served their purpose, and Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. The Golden Venture passengers had the misfortune of arriving in America on the wrong side of another swing of the political pendulum. They came to America in part because they had been assured that this country’s garment and restaurant industries had an insatiable demand for undocumented workers who were willing to put in long hours for less than minimum wage. Yet their arrival coincided with a national panic about the sanctity of our borders: the shootings outside the CIA in January 1993 had been committed by an asylum applicant who had entered the country illegally; Ramzi Yousef, the man behind the World Trade Center bombing in February 1993 was an asylum applicant as well. Political fear prevailed, and the Chinese passengers were denied a fair and thorough assessment of their asylum claims, and detained.

In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, it would appear that national security is again the prevailing concern: it has become much more difficult for foreigners—documented and otherwise—to enter the country; politicians frequently invoke the security of our borders, focusing on (and at times exploiting) the sense of violation experienced by a nation that has been attacked from within; and militias of gun-toting “Minutemen” patrol the southern border, endeavoring to stem the tide of migrant workers. There are only immigration politics—and this is an election year.

Yet behind the scenes, our country’s need for cheap labor endures, and continues to lure illegal migrants willing to undertake almost any risk in order to secure work in America. New Orleans is being rebuilt by illegal immigrants; some thirty thousand Latin Americans have been drawn to the region since Hurricane Katrina, many of them enticed by local contractors who pay low wages and offer no benefits. Without this supply of laborers the effort might cost tens of millions of dollars more. In the very border states that feel most threatened by illegal immigration, undocumented Mexican day laborers congregate outside Home Depots every morning; while the political rhetoric in these parts may be fiercely anti-immigrant, area residents are happy to hire these men for a pittance to do lawn work and construction. The oft-invoked analogy between illegal immigration and the drug trade is an apt one: any crackdown that focuses exclusively on the supply-side (or, for that matter, at-the-border interdiction), will fall considerably short.

Adopt for a moment the point of view of a prospective migrant from a poor country, be it China, Mexico, or someplace in between. You may be fleeing tyranny or misfortune, or simply seeking greater opportunity, but leaving your country and entering the United States illegally is not a decision you will take lightly: it involves a careful weighing of costs and benefits—and risks. (Many of the Golden Venture passengers trekked overland through the mountains of Burma and the jungles of Thailand to secure passage on the ship, only to endure a four month voyage of such Conradian horror—300 people in a 20 by 40 foot hold, one bathroom between them, a small portion of rice and water each day—that they cannot bring themselves to discuss it even now.) Before undertaking such an odyssey, it would be instructive to have a sense of what kind of reception you might expect upon arrival.

But rather than a firm, coherent stance, the U.S. offers instead a morass of mixed messages, strict-but-unenforced laws, and competing conceptions of the role that the 11 million illegal immigrants currently residing in this country should play. Were the Senate bill to pass, illegal immigrants who had lived in the country for five years or more would be put on the path to citizenship; were the House bill to pass, they would be considered criminals, and arrested.

President Bush’s proposal for a guest worker program, while it might seem like a compromise that provides for cheap labor without adding to the permanent illegal population, is misguided. From an ethical perspective, guest worker programs are exploitative and run the risk of establishing a quasi-apartheid class divide. But more fundamentally, from a pragmatic perspective, the guest worker initiative misunderstands what drives people to come to the United States. The Golden Venture passengers and others like them come to America fully knowing that they will toil for years at jobs others would not want as part of the migrant underclass. But what draws them is the promise that their American-born children will do better—a promise that a temporary guest worker permit cruelly withholds.

It may be that a coherent solution will never be forthcoming—that a sloppy, inconsistent immigration system has the great advantage of flexibility, and allows officials to adapt to the ebb and flow of economic and security considerations. Indeed, some suggest that the only thing worse than the severely broken system we have now would be a sweeping legislative effort to fix it. But if we are going to continue broadcasting mixed messages to the outside world, we must shoulder some of the responsibility for those who, heeding the siren song of hope and prosperity that this country continues to sing, mortgage their own lives to arrive here. Whether through congressional or executive action, the Golden Venture passengers should have their status normalized. They pay taxes, contribute to the economy, and have more than paid their price for entering this country illegally. Indeed, in their unalloyed devotion to the United States and what, at its best, it represents, these Chinese men are in some ways more American than most of us will ever be.

Patrick Radden Keefe is a fellow in international affairs at The Century Foundation.