Illegal immigration is one of today’s hot-button, hot-potato issues. And this is an election season, with no shortage of hot oratorical winds blowing from campaign stumps in Iowa, New Hampshire and other early-voting venues.

There are other, possibly more important topics stalking us at every turn, but the Iraq war, terrorism, economic troubles, rebuilding from hurricane damage, health care system gridlocks, Constitutional clashes, governmental secrecy, Guantanamo prison, tax cutting, the shrinking dollar, energy shortages, global warming, the Medicare mess … they’re all so complicated. Twelve sides to every argument.

But illegal immigration? Cut and dried, to a lot of people, and tailor-made for these politically-charged times.

As the Journal Star has suggested before, the problem with immigration reform has always been that there are too many zealots who insist that only their version of reform is acceptable. They refuse to concede anything.  And so nothing is done.

Continuing the status quo means the estimated 12 million illegals already in the country will continue to work, drive and go about their lives in a shadowy existence that limits full community participation. The channels for workers to legally enter the country will remain clogged and befuddling. Illegal immigrants will continue to flood across the border.

Evidence of the status quo’s failure is at hand.

It comes with a price, and, as Journal Star writer Kevin Abourezk reported Oct. 7, children and families too often pay that price with mental anguish.  Children have been torn from fathers and mothers, their schooling interrupted and families left without resources to care for young ones.

Abourezk’s article focused on a raid last December in Grand Island and on the raid’s repercussions throughout the city, school system, the entire student body, social services and the police department.

Also, the story was about an 11-year-old girl whose father was ripped from her family when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents staged a surprise raid on the Swift meatpacking plant in Grand Island. The young girl’s world fell apart that day.

The entire community of Grand Island was in upheaval. Children were stranded, and suspicion of authority spread like a plague. Families huddled in hiding, afraid to send their children back to school in fear the kids would be snatched up by agents.

The community as a whole reacted admirably under the circumstances. Damage seemed to be less than it could have been, but the children’s psychological torment and scars are incalculable.

The National Council of La Raza, a national Hispanic advocacy organization, has investigated the Grand Island raid, along with two others, and will release a study later this month of the effects of workplace raids on children, families and communities. Maybe some answers will come from this and other sources.  In the meantime, workplace raids continue across the United States.

The Journal Star has consistently supported repeated bipartisan efforts in Congress for comprehensive immigration reform, with steps to advance and humanize the process. But the measures were knocked down by buzz words like “amnesty” and other nonnegotiable, simplistic sticking points.

Apparently, there are some people who don’t want the hot button to cool off.

“We’re not saying we support illegal immigration,” said Yolanda Nuncio of the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Social Services, “but there’s got to be a better way of handling these things.”

Thousands of innocent children would agree.