It's a shame that it has gone this far. All the protests, the boycotts, the lawsuits, the exodus of immigrants, the fear, the confusion, the misinformation, the denigration, the harassment, the anger and the heated debates over immigration could have been avoided -- or at least diminished -- if our elected officials had fulfilled their duty and passed immigration reform.

In the past few years, Congress has had many opportunities to fix our broken immigration system, but when it gets close to reaching some kind of compromise, politics and extremism get in the way of reason. This year, Democrats and Republicans are even further apart on the issue.

Arizona's SB1070 has shaken things up quite a bit. It is an ill-conceived law that does nothing to solve the problem its supporters claim to be targeting: the violence on the border. It uses undocumented immigrants who come to this country in search of a better life as scapegoats by criminalizing their presence in the country, but does not go after the drug dealers and human traffickers on the border.

I don't care how many amendments have been added to the law that supposedly prohibit racial profiling, it will still happen -- in fact, it has been for years. Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio has been stopping people whom he suspects of being in the country “illegally” for quite some time based solely on their appearance. There are literally hundreds of civil-rights lawsuits against him, many from Hispanic legal residents or U.S. citizens of Hispanic descent who have been stopped and questioned about legal status. Arpaio cynically vows to continue doing it regardless of the challenges to the new Arizona law.

That is not the way to solve an immigration problem that has many layers. The only way is through comprehensive immigration reform that deals with the issues of security, employment verification, controlled legal immigration and, most importantly, what to do with the millions of undocumented immigrants already in the country -- who, almost everyone agrees, cannot be deported.

Supporters of the immigration law are mostly conservative Republicans who blame the federal government for its inaction on immigration. Yet there is not a single Republican willing to co-sponsor an immigration-reform bill. Democrats in Congress are not willing to attempt to pass it on their own, as they did with health reform. The blame lies in Congress, not in the Obama administration.

President Barack Obama has articulated in more than one speech the importance of immigration reform, yet nothing is being done. He has been bombarded from both sides. The Latino community is holding him responsible for not keeping his promise to have an immigration-reform bill he could support during his first year in office. Even though he does not have the power to make laws, they claim he could be doing more, like stopping the deportations that lead to the separation of families. Conservatives say he is not doing enough to keep the border safe, although he claims to have sent more military presence to the border than at any other time in history. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Arizona Sen. John McCain, who co-sponsored the last immigration-reform bill debated in Congress, has criticized the Department of Justice's lawsuit trying to block the Arizona law from going into effect July 29. But McCain has not done anything to introduce a new law that addresses his constituents' concerns. It is a very hypocritical position coming from someone in the federal government who has the power not only to help create legislation and rally his party behind it, but to change the tone of the debate. He and other legislators blame “them” when they are part of “them.”

Unfortunately, it's all politics. Polls show the majority of Americans support the Arizona anti-immigrant law, and in an election year, polls matter. But most polls also show that the majority of voters would support an immigration-reform bill even if it included a path to legalization for undocumented immigrants. It seems those polls are being ignored.

The Arizona law and others that are being proposed in several states are not going to solve the immigration problem. All they accomplish is to divide the country and add more fuel to fire. Stop the insanity now. Congress, do your job.

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(Maria Elena Salinas is the author of “I AM MY FATHER'S DAUGHTER: LIVING A LIFE WITHOUT SECRETS.” Reach her at www .mariaesalinas.com)

© 2010 by Maria Elena Salinas

Distributed by King Features Syndicate