It traverses 1,950 miles, through deserts, along and through rivers, and over mountains. It has remained, essentially, unmoved for more than 150 years. It, arguably, marks the boundary between not only two nations, but two markedly different worlds.

It is this country’s southern border.

Driven to the forefront in this election year, as it has been through several election cycles now, is the issue of securing, or – to some – unsecuring this hair-thin line on the map. The politicians speak of walls, policies, quotas and all the other buzz words that come with any campaign platform plank and its associated plethora of campaign promises.

One thing is very clear: The border is there for a reason. That long line reaching across the continent from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico has remained essentially unchanged since the conclusion of the Gadsen Purchase in 1854. In the intervening 153 years, however, much has changed in that particular part of the world.

Of the roughly 11 million illegal immigrants in this country today, nearly 60 percent hail from our nearest neighbor to the south.

Illegal immigration is just that – illegal. If one of us breaks the speed limit on Lincoln Way, we are breaking the law and are fined. If we vandalize a post office, we have broken the law and go to federal court. As a nation we seem to have no problem with the prosecution of various criminals at all levels: carjackers, slum lords, price gougers, embezzlers and fraudulent corporate executives – all these and many more, we as a nation gladly send to state and federal prisons around the country for defying our laws. Even bad laws – prohibition, for instance – are still laws, and many in the 1920s and early 1930s were tried and incarcerated for breaking it.

What makes illegal immigration any less of a crime than the others?

In the wake of the al-Qaida attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. nearly six-and-a-half years ago, it is absolutely embarrassing, unconscionable and – to point out the blatantly obvious – dangerous to leave a 2,000-mile-wide hole in this nation’s outer skin. It can be supposed with some amount of certainty that had a suicide bomber, airline hijacker or al-Qaida operative come across that border by the same methods thousands upon thousands of illegal immigrants are allowed to each year, that the Mexican border would have slammed shut tighter than a bank vault, with no expense spared on the part of our government or outcry on the part of the American public. What, then, stops it from happening currently?

This argument is more than a discussion about corruption in Mexico and its effect upon the common Mexican. It also rises above mere economic considerations or human rights claims.

What is at stake here is the rule of law. In allowing illegal immigration to go on virtually unhampered, or to take the reprehensible step of allowing, abetting or ignoring this phenomenon is to deny all of us our human right to be protected by our own laws. If immigration laws are ignorable, then what of fraud, tax evasion, speeding, running red lights and petty theft? For a government to officially ignore one of its own laws is to ignore all its laws. There can be no middle ground. Each law carries with it the presumed backing of the government – otherwise no law can be effective.

The threat of punishment is what keeps each of us from flagrantly flaunting the law – what keeps us from driving 130 mph on the interstate, what keeps us from running the red lights and ultimately, what protects us from ourselves, each other and our institutions. This has been the purpose of laws since the beginning of organized government. What, then, gives our immigration laws any less force and importance than, say, the statutes against manslaughter, money laundering or terrorism?

For certain of our current politicians – particularly presidential candidates – to even entertain the idea of suborning illegal immigration should, at the very least, inspire doubt in every American’s thoughts, and is a bizarre, distended extrapolation of America’s immigrant past, which we ought rightly to prize, but which was undertaken in large part under much different circumstances.

Illegal immigration is just that – illegal.

– Ryan Frederick is a senior in management from Orient.