1. Ability to enjoy all the freedoms granted in the Constitution AND satisfy all the responsibilities in there (however interpreted by the judicial branch and amended by the legislative branch over the years)

2. Ownership of your primary residence

3. Having enough funds for your kids to get a BA with minimal debt

4. Taking a 1-2 year vacation every year

5. Saving enough money to be able to retire at 65 (or whatever, given life expectancy)

6. Each successive generation does better (financially, quality of life – wise) than the generation that preceded it

7. Leaving behind a legacy of some kind (as defined as helping at least one other person achieve their own American Dream – it helps if this person is not directly related to you but not necessarily

8. The pursuit of happiness – another slippery one but defined as maximum physical and mental health given ones genetics and self-induced factors and living above the poverty line.

But that’s exactly why it IS cause for a civil rights movement: If it were just that Mr. Koroknay-Palicz was told no when he was young, it wouldn’t be grounds for a movement, especially now that he’s 26. But the fact is that millions of people, some of them far more intelligent and responsible than the average voter, are deprived of basic rights. And that is grounds for a movement to liberate them.

You wrote: “Alex believes that a youth should have the same rights as an adult if he proves he is mature (although what defines “mature” is open to interpretation).”

Here, too, you made the youth-rights point: What qualifies as maturity is debatable and hard to discern. Surely, then, we cannot determine whether a person is adequately mature for a particular right by asking how old he is! Yet the whole idea of minimum ages is that people below a certain age are not mature, or otherwise well-developed, enough for certain rights. The fact is, we cannot determine anything relevant to a person’s ability to drink, drive, vote, marry, serve in the military, watch movies, or simply come and go as he pleases by asking his age.

John is correct that we’d limit illegal immigration if we punished employers. We’d probably also crush our own economy. Construction companies would close, huge numbers of working mothers would lose nannies, and all the hotels and restaurants and subways that depend on those workers would be in desperate straits. And soldiers on our borders! What a public relations nightmare that would be. Haven’t we engendered enough anti-American sentiment with pictures from Iraq? If not enough people hate us, allowing sick or injured people to die rather than treat them at taxpayer-supported hospitals would do it. Worse, our wobbly moral compass would go completely off course.

The only reasonable suggestion John makes is that children of illegal immigrants not be granted citizenship. If our education system improves the lot of a child who should not be here in the first place, then he should go home to his own country and improve the lot of others. The citizenship of the parents should determine the citizenship of the child.

The only humane, as well as economically feasible, answer to the problem of illegal immigration is a guest worker program. It is the only good idea of this administration and it makes perfect sense. Workers are needed here to do jobs Americans won’t do, and much of their money is sent back home, a form of foreign aid. If their contributions are legitimized by a federal guest worker program, they can be granted rights and protections, and then, instead of swelling the U.S. population, they can go home again when their families are economically more stable.

I agree with you. Society has to have a few clearly-defined absolutes in order to function consistently. I don’t know of any teenager who doesn’t think his or her elders is completely wrong on just about everything.

However, we get out of our children what we invest in them. Our generation should be inspiring youngsters to be like us and to trust us. Perhaps there is a growing concern among today’s youth that they must represent themselves because we are not doing it for them. We can’t all be immature. Someone has to lead.

This is an interesting question. We should probably take the next step and ask “does it matter?” The American founding documents mention life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Life, liberty, and the opportunity to pursue happiness can be eroded even for high-income couples if they don’t have health insurance to deal with catastrophic health situations; if they cannot find child care because child care providers can’t afford to live nearby; if they live in a dangerous or polluted world. Also, people judge their wealth by those whom they live near or compare themselves to — if people watch “lifestyles of the rich and famous”, they may view themselves as poor even if they are vastly more prosperous than their parents or than people in other countries. The purpose of creating an Opportunity Economy is to give everyone the same opportunity to pursue wealth, in the belief that this is the best way to create a society where people can pursue all of their dreams — including the option of not pursuing wealth but instead pursuing more leisure, more spirituality, whatever.

I am not even certain the debate should be what to do about the 12 million-odd illegal immigrants in the US – not yet anyway.

The debate should be about what we are going to do to ensure we have a productive workforce of Americans, and those who wish to become Americans, while being able to keep out those we don’t feel will be productive members of our society. Not everyone who wants to come to the US deserves the opportunity – we have no way to enforce that today.

Once we have the power to decide who gets to come in and who doesn’t, then you’ll find a lot more support for doing “the right thing” about those who are here already, as we have through most of our history as a nation.