On the dark side of the moon, or in Boulder, Colorado, whichever is closer, polar opposites sometimes agree, writes Jurek Martin. It was under the Flatiron rocks two months back that Mike Franc, of the conservative Heritage Foundation, confessed to seeing no legislative solution to the immigration problem, which I couldn't either.

Franc is also a nice guy so I wasn't surprised. But now, in an even more shocking development, I find myself, perhaps for the first time, endorsing something written by the ultimate stuffed-shirt High Tory columnist, George Will.

Surveying the national mood and the legislative options on the congressional table, he simply concluded that it might be better all round to have no new bill at all, leaving the status quo, broken as it may be, in place until cooler and more rational heads prevail.

It may be within the wit of even this incompetent Washington regime to come up with a workable "guest worker" programme, not exactly rocket science. But nothing else under discussion passes any reasonable litmus test.

The House bill, which would try and make the southern border with Mexico harder to cross, is almost too easy to criticise. Put simply, walls don't work. They did not help the Roman Emperor Hadrian keep the Picts and Scots out for long, nor did the one in Berlin keep east Europeans bottled up indefinitely.

But it is the incredibly complicated, albeit well-intentioned, Senate "path to citizenship" for those already here illegally that boggles the mind. It seems no senator has even tried to put himself or herself into the heads of an illegal immigrant, many already well established, with families, paying taxes and living under official radars.

Why would anybody with half a brain come out into the open, return home and submit themselves to bureaucratic procedures for readmission when officials can't even handle the present flow of legal immigrants efficiently?

The immigration enforcement division of the Department of Homeland Security freely admits it is not ready for the job – and won't be for months, which may mean years. After all, this is the government that has spent the last three years trying to produce a frequent traveller card for screened airline passengers – and failing.

Workplace enforcement, with sanctions on companies who employ illegals, is a popular cause because it sounds equitable. But I would have thought the last thing small business needs is another layer of bureaucratic supervision, with penalties for even unwitting non-compliance.

There is, in any case, far too much Big Brother prying into citizens' lives, mostly under dubious national security justifications. As Elizabeth Drew illustrates in the New York Review of Books, the Bush presidency has disturbingly expanded its authority often in disregard for the laws of the land.

And if this was not bad enough, the anti-immigrant brigade seems to want to make this a nation of vigilantes, with any old Joe Soap free to turn in anybody suspected of not being here legally (memo to self: use sign language in supermarket rather than reveal foreign accent).

One brave councilman in Montgomery County, Maryland, has found himself pilloried by local talk show hosts recently for saying he did not think this was what local government should be doing. He also said the whole idea sounded "un-American" – as a non-American, I concur.

What is as distressing as anything is the appalling quality of some of the "research" that supposedly informs those who make laws. A particularly offensive canard doing the current rounds, but as old as the hills, is a paper attributing increases in crime to immigration.

The Migration Policy Institute (confession; the think-tank co-founded by my wife Kathleen Newland) has just published a devastating counter-argument by four academics associated with the University of California at Irvine. Not that you will hear it cited by the anti-immigrant rabble-rousers.

Using US census and other data, it shows the incarceration rate of the US born (3.51 per cent) was four times that of the foreign born (0.86 per cent), which was, in turn, half the 1.71 per cent rate of non-Hispanic white natives and 13 times less than the 11.6 per cent for black men.

Imprisonment of second generation immigrants does start to rise measurably, exceeding, except for Chinese and Filipinos, native levels. But this seems more a reflection of the society immigrants have joined than the ones they left.

I checked back with Mike Franc this week and he said Heritage policy analysts were similarly torn over immigration. One, Robert Rector, has produced a wildly controversial paper claiming America is about to be drowned by as many as 100m new immigrants.

Franc conceded he could not recall any issue that had involved so many disparate policy fields without anything even approaching consensus emerging – and this in a supposedly rigid ideological institute.

And he still cannot see the outlines of a rational legislative solution. Which ought to be a caution for the two houses, as they haggle in their pivotal conference sessions, to step back from "getting it done". The cure can indeed be worse than the disease.

onohana@aol.com