It appears that this presidential election year’s latest distraction from talking about the economy, which nobody really knows how to fix, is talking about immigration. It’s the immigrants-built-this-country side vs. the immigrants-are-taking-our-jobs side. The debate happens with dreary regularity in this country, especially in times of economic distress.

It’s particularly distressing to watch because both sides have elephants in the room and labor mightily to ignore them.

Full disclosure: I’m in the immigrants-built-this-country camp for two very personal reasons. First off, and most importantly, my grandparents came to this country from Sicily. They were illiterate Sicilian peasants, who built a life with their strong backs; now, two short generations later, one of their grandchildren has made a living as a writer and is pursuing a master’s degree. The closest I come to physical labor is carrying around library books. It says all you need to know about my family’s story that I have a life my grandparents could never even have conceived of.

Second, my daughter-in-law is first-generation Mexican-American. That means the grandchildren I’ll probably have some day will be half-Mexican-American, with ties to a family that, while entirely legal, has close ties to a foreign culture. My daughter-in-law’s first language was Spanish.

So I do have a couple of dogs in this particular fight, albeit in a sort of one-off way.

Those of us who favor a relatively liberal immigration policy, though, had better learn a way to address what is a very important question: the law.

It’s hard – impossible, really – to argue that anybody who enters this country illegally should be given a break. After all, most of us are descended from immigrants who followed the rules when they came here. Granted, times were different when my grandparents arrived at the turn of the last century, but immigration wasn’t necessarily easier. Talk to somebody who came through Ellis Island sometime; it was a truly terrifying experience.

Still and all, most of our ancestors jumped through the hoops. There isn’t any really good reason why today’s immigrants shouldn’t have to take the same path.

Where it gets sticky, though, is the question of children who are born to illegals here. The fact is, it’s always been true that being born on American soil has conferred citizenship. Say all you want about “anchor babies,” but it takes some pretty tortured reasoning to say that somebody born here doesn’t deserve to be a citizen. It’s not like one gets to pick where one is born.

To go back to the original point, however, illegal immigrants do use services for which they don’t pay. From a strictly personal standpoint, I’m a devotee of reality; unless we want third-world nationals dying of starvation in our streets, we pretty much have to bite the bullet and help them. But, and this is a big consideration, I can certainly understand why somebody would feel differently. I’m personally willing to put up with a certain amount of unfairness, but somebody can make a perfectly adequate case that we shouldn’t. It’s one of those cases where even if I’m personally willing to pay for something, somebody else may have perfectly good reasons to disagree with me.

The pro-immigration side has resolutely refused to discuss those issues of fairness. For example, those of us who favor a looser immigration policy had better come up with a good explanation why school taxpayers should have to pony up for English-language classes that would largely serve the children of illegal immigrants. There may be reasons they should, but I can’t see many reasons they should have to.

There are elephants on the other side, though, the biggest one being “the immigrants are taking our jobs.” No, they aren’t – at least not the immigrant’s people are worried about. Talk to any farmer and they’ll tell you that white Americans aren’t exactly beating down the door looking for stoop laboring jobs. The Southwest, in particular, built its agricultural economy on the backs of immigrants doing stoop labor. Those are the kinds of jobs you take when you have virtually no other options and most Americans have such options, even if they involve borrowing money from relatively wealthier members of the family.

And when it comes to foreigners taking American jobs, the anti-immigration people are way off what should be our real target, outsourcing of jobs to foreign countries by manufacturers. Until there are major structural changes in the economy that no longer make that cost-effective for businesses, it’s going to keep happening. The chances of stopping it, given the way money rules this nation, are slim to none. And besides, you don’t see what isn’t there; you can’t physically point to a missing job. You can, however, physically point to a brown person who doesn’t speak English and say, “Aha! There’s the guy who took my job.”

In the end, it all comes down to some philosophical but still practical question: Are we our brother’s keeper? Do people have a right to better themselves? And perhaps more importantly, do people have a right to better themselves at the expense of others?

My answer to those first two questions is a resounding yes, but that third question is the thorny one, because it cuts both ways. Those of us who think the 1 percenters should pay a bigger share of running this nation also have to consider that if we favor open immigration, we’re asking people in the 99 percent to pay more to handle the immigration issue. We can’t have it both ways and we better find a way to justify our inconsistency.