Significantly, the plans were put on hold not because U.S. Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff objected, nor out of concern the maps would reveal the trespassers’ new routes to U.S. Immigration police -- nobody worries about them -- but because, in the words of Miguel Angel Paredes, a spokesman for the Mexican agency, “This would be practically like telling her Minutemen where the migrants are going to be.”

Such civilian vigilantes have never shot or arrested anyone. What does it tell us that the Mexicans worry more about them than armed U.S. border guards?

Told that it would be less expensive than the $300,000 the county now spends recovering and storing the bodies of illegal immigrants who die traversing the Arizona desert, Tucson’s Pima County board of supervisors last fall allocated $25,000 to help the Arizona-based group “Humane Borders” -- the folks who drew up the now-postponed safe route maps -- install water stations designed to make it easier and safer for the invaders to break the law.

What next? Concerned that too many child molesters are getting injured in the pursuit of their favorite hobby, will our county commissions start allocating money to place ladders against the walls of houses with second story bedrooms, accompanied by glow-in-the-dark window posters promising “Cute Child Sleeps Here”?

Most Americans are fed up not just with illegal immigration, but with tone-deaf officials who refuse to respond with anything but shrugs, platitudes, and amnesty plans when the vast majority of their countrymen ask, “Why should we obey the law if they don’t? Why am I ‘out of luck’ if an uninsured illegal slams into my car? Why should we pay taxes to support hospitals that are pushed toward bankruptcy because illegals use their expensive, state-of-the-art Emergency Rooms as their free “doctor’s office”? Why should we be taxed to support increasingly crowded and ineffective free government schools clogged with the non-English-speaking children of people who have no legal right to be here? Why should we support a federal government that makes little effort to catch these criminals, and lets most of them go if they’re caught, anyway?”

A Jan. 23 CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll found only 25 percent of Americans approve of the way President Bush is handling illegal immigration.

“There were seven issues tested in that poll,” says CNN Senior Political Analyst William Schneider, “and President Bush got his worst rating, worst of all seven, on the issue of immigration. ... Sixty-two percent disapprove. Worse than the economy, worse than Iraq. ...”

Long-time conservative commentator Phyllis Schlafly estimates that “In demanding a guest-worker plan that smacks of amnesty, the Bush administration is taking the unpopular side of a party division that is at least 80-20.”

When 88 percent of Republican House members voted in December for a border-security bill authored by House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., which rejected Bush’s guest worker/amnesty plan, “that should have been a wake-up call to the president,” Ms. Schlafly notes.

“Shortly thereafter, Arizona Republican National Committee member Randy Pullen gathered enough signatures to present a resolution to the Republican National Committee at its Jan. 19-20 meeting in Washington, D.C., which endorsed border security measures and opposed any guest worker plan.”

On the evening of Jan. 19, “The Bush administration sent in its big guns, Vice President Dick Cheney and Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., to insist that RNC members support the guest worker plan or else they would be labeled disloyal and disrespectful of President Bush. ...”

The “big guns” were only partially successful. To avoid embarrassing the president, the RNC simply avoided any specific vote on the border security-”guest worker” issue.

“This donnybrook happened on the same day that the New York Times reported that 18,207 illegal immigrants from nations other than Mexico have been the beneficiaries of the Bush administration’s scandalous ‘catch and release’ procedure in the three months since Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff promised to ‘return every single illegal entrant -- no exceptions,’ ” Ms. Schlafly reports.

“Why are President Bush and Karl Rove so tone deaf on this issue? Some speculate that the Bush administration is in the pocket of big business lobbying interests that want the cheap labor made available by the government’s failure to enforce our immigration laws. ...

“The administration-imposed RNC defeat of the majority view of Republicans is bad news for the 2006 congressional elections,” Ms. Schlafly concludes. “Bush is alienating his political base. ...”

On the issue of government handouts to illegals, common sense seems to be breaking out all over -- except in Washington.

“A lot of us were saying, instead of raising taxes, why don’t we start prioritizing where we’re spending our existing money,” comments Delegate David B. Albo, the Fairfax Republican who sponsored the Virginia bill which cut off state benefits to illegal aliens there, effective Jan. 1.

“One of the things we found was the state was not checking for legal presence for Medicaid,’” Albo told Dionne Walker of The Associated Press.

Illegals without bona fide Social Security numbers will no longer receive Medicaid in the state of Virginia. They will not be handed temporary assistance for welfare-style families. They’re not allowed to get aid from other state and local offices. Sponsors say the changes will save millions -- assuming creative judges don’t throw them out, discovering new “rights” for those with no right to be here.

“Mr. Albo could not specify how many illegal aliens might be receiving public benefits,” The AP reported. “But he said the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles rejected 187,000 applicants the first year after 2004 legislation restricted illegals from obtaining driver’s licenses.”

In fact, it’s estimated there are 200,000 illegal aliens in Virginia; at least 11 million nationwide.

Can America really make room for that many new immigrants? Sure -- if they agree to play by the rules, obey the law, find work, and pay their own way. If Congress wants to authorize bigger legal immigration numbers, let them do so.

But why should residents of Europe and Asia and Africa -- people willing to learn English and pass health inspections and meet other reasonable requirements -- sit on endless waiting lists, while de facto first priority goes to often-illiterate Latin American cheaters who broke the law ... with an occasional resourceful al-Qaida saboteur thrown in for good measure?