The most common and most powerful argument against comprehensive immigration reform involves the claim that providing illegals with a path to legalization amounts to rewarding bad behavior. If you reward bad behavior, doesn’t that always mean that you’ll get more of it?

This logic is unassailable, but the bi-partisan Senate bill makes a point of rewarding only good behavior. If an illegal immigrant comes forward, pays a fine for his illegal entry, registers with the government, gets verifiable ID, and goes through a background check, isn’t that a step in the right direction? The new system would only provide rewards – like the right to remain in the US – in return for such positive actions; without them, the immigrant would be subject to deportation.

Of course, sneaking across the border without authorization amounts to bad behavior – but the new bill devotes considerable resources to stopping such entries in the future. For those who have already crossed, who have already behaved badly, it provides a means to atone for your negative actions with positive steps – not automatic forgiveness. To earn full legal residency, you’d need to pay a total of $6,500 in fines and fees (per worker), wait for a minimum of eight years, learn English, pay back taxes, prove that you’re fully employed more than 90% of the time, and go back to your home country to apply for a visa. Then, after that, it would still take a minimum of five more years – a total of 13 years – for citizenship. This is not some “free pass,” that privileges rule breakers.

Do we want to encourage illegals to try to rectify their status – to come out of the shadows, play by the rules, pay all taxes due, learn English, and assimilate into our society? Or do we only want them to disappear – nursing the delusional fantasy that some 12 million human beings will somehow uproot themselves (in many cases after years of US residency) and return to their impoverished homelands simply because we want them to do so?

And speaking of rewarding good behavior, and punishing the bad: those courageous conservatives (Senators Kyl, Graham, Isakson and, yes, McCain) who have worked constructively and seriously on immigration reform deserve our support, not our rage, while those politicians and media figures who have demagogued this issue in a way that only makes it worse, in no way merit our encouragement.