Rep. Tom Tancredo, Colorado Republican, is still running for president, but he's announced he won't be seeking re-election to his congressional seat. Too bad for the country, although I'm sure he'll find far pleasanter things to do--unless, that is, he makes it to the Oval Office.
    But what a congressional legacy he leaves. Having entered Congress in 1999 to bring America back to its immigration senses, Tancredo had given himself a seemingly impossible task: persuading the nation that there was an illegal immigration problem in the first place. This was something Americans from many walks of life--from Big Business, with its addiction to cheap labor, to soccer moms, with their dependence on cheap child care, to comfy yuppies, with their aversion to mowing lawns and cleaning house--all too readily denied.
    And if that wasn't hard enough, he also had to persuade people there was a solution to this problem of porous borders that ten or twenty million mainly Spanish-speaking illegal aliens had crossed--and still cross. What are you gonna do, his detractors would say, build a fence?
     Well, yes. That was one idea. And while that fence has yet to be built, it has been voted into law and signed by the president (despite himself). In the course of that debate--in the course of all of his debates--Tancredo has helped  many Americans to envision their land once again as a nation with defineable, defendable borders--a considerable testament to a worthy congressional career.