Billions need not be spent on a wall to keep out Mexicans. Imprison every employer of an illegal immigrant for 15 years, and confiscate all their property, as is done for drugs. This is guaranteed to work. In 48 hours all highways going south will be choked with traffic.

"Ah, but the cost of peas and tomatoes will go up 15 cents," say some.

Can’t have it both ways. Then why spend money on a wall? Duh.

Either you want immigrant labor or not. Green cards were intended to produce a compromise. Fine. Those workers are not illegal. Their employers are safe.

Incidentally, paying U.S. workers a living wage per hour adds next to nothing to each one of a million cans of peas. Supply and demand operate so that "labor" rarely affects the price of food. For example, in 2002 and 2004, India had huge bumper harvests while millions starved. Wheat rotted to increase profit margins.

Compromise, a highly acclaimed goal, means immigration continues, there may be a negligible consumer benefit no one notices, and taxpayers get to pay rich contractors for a wall which is defended by well-salaried security forces. This is not even a compromise solution. It is a meaningless plan because no solution is wanted!

Sex. Almost everyone desires permanent marriages, faithful spouses and children who are not perverts by the time they reach 18. At least each American desires this for a few hours of their day. For the rest of their day they want hot babes on the same TV shows watched by their children, legalized prostitution, easy divorce, and lifelong custody payments. Like New York’s Governor Spitzer, they prosecute sex crimes for part of their day, then commit them in another.

Compromise does not merely produce confusion. America has no moral code whatsoever. Baptist preachers spend their vacations in Las Vegas whorehouses. Mormons marry 14-year-old girls. Public exposure is criminal while nude dancers make a good living with it.

Americans don’t have limitless sex. They don’t have morality. They have nothing.

Americans want the opportunity to make millions or at least retire comfortably if they do not succeed. After being exploited all their lives by those more clever, better educated, or wealthier, they are astonished to have no health care or social security.

Compromise is a belief Americans can have it both ways. Most, over 90 percent, receive nothing. They don’t amass millions. They don’t have social benefits.

Americans want democracy, then elect people as their dictators for two, four or six years. A few states offer some referendums, but basically everyone must obey laws they never voted for, and pay taxes for things they don’t want.

Either you make the laws, or someone else makes them. Duh. Americans don’t have democracy. They don’t have a total dictatorship. They receive neither.

They want justice, then allow judges and prosecutors immunity for deviating from the laws and Constitution they swore to obey. A right is a right for everybody or it is not a guaranteed right, is it? The moment it does not protect one person, it is no longer guaranteed to protect you.

Compromise has meant there is not one single right left. Rights were interpreted away to forbid some guns, allow limitless surveillance, permit torture, allow involuntary statements in courtrooms and permit totally unfair trials. All is done according to the perverse whims of those elected representatives.

Americans receive nothing. They have no rights any more. Surrendering their freedoms has produced not one thing in exchange.

Where no one stands firm on their beliefs, it is axiomatic none really believed in anything. The lukewarm are spit out and spat upon.

The spirit of compromise was meant to leave both sides of an issue with something. People should demand they at least receive something, that something be absolutely guaranteed, subject to no interpretation whatsoever. Or they receive nothing.

Protecting their own guarantees is where Americans have failed most miserably. The result is a nation where everybody settles for getting nothing.

Richard Geffken