For months I’ve been trying to form a viewpoint on immigration reform. I haven’t gotten there yet. Have any of you readers embraced your favorite solution to the dilemma? Walls, deportation, assimilation, status quo or what?

With the shelving last Friday of the Senate’s bipartisan immigration reform bill, I’ve reached one conclusion: the issue is absolutely perplexing. And if it’s crystal clear for you, perhaps you haven’t dug deep enough.

Interestingly, Colorado has become a hotbed for immigration reform thanks to the efforts of politicians from this state, some behaving nobly and some ridiculously.

Now that Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo—America’s version of France’s hatemonger Jean-Marie Le Pen—is chasing the presidency, his one-size-fits-all message (his only message), that immigrants are the source of all problems, is reaching a nationwide audience. In a recent interview with Time magazine, he brushes off his inattention to global warming by blaming the Sierra Club for not fighting immigration, saying, “The fact is, Americans consume more energy than anyone else, so if a person moves here from another country, they automatically become bigger polluters.” Is that the best contribution Colorado can make to the national debate?

Tancredo tears a page from the Bush playbook, taking an enormously complicated problem and boiling it down to good versus evil. After all, there’s nothing like a universal enemy, real or otherwise, to spare loyal followers the unpleasantness of complexity. Just as Bush blends Saddam, insurgents, Syria, Shiites, Sunnis, Iran, North Korea, enemy combatants and detainees (and, perhaps, even disloyal US prosecutors) into a smelly witches brew called “evil doers,” Tancredo mixes his own nasty concoction of legal immigrants (he would ban for 3 years even legal immigration), illegals, migrant workers, guest workers, Huns, reprobates and Blue Meanies. Tancredo has learned the expeditiousness of a hate message; we’re all quick studies when it comes to shifting blame.

Meanwhile, Senator Ken Salazar knows that substantive problem-solving takes time and thought. He’s one of 12 senators, part of a bipartisan group, seeking a palatable center between the left and the right. When I first heard Salazar tell a Fort Collins audience, “I really just want to set politics aside and find solutions to our problems,” I was skeptical. But I’m coming around.

Meanwhile, our other Senator, Wayne Allard, threw a bone to conservatives with a failed amendment that would’ve raised obstacles to eventual citizenship. No help there.

Here’s what I have concluded about the immigration debate. All Americans benefit from immigrants, legal and illegal, through cheaper goods and an improved standard of living. If you eat fresh fruits and veggies and enjoy a clean hotel room, you are complicit. Therefore, no one has the right to get too high on his or her horse. The lesson for the American people: reject righteous rants from hypocrites.

Also, cries from the right of “No Amnesty!” don’t help. This shallow catchphrase, as we saw last week, shuts down progress without offering anything constructive.

My advice: forget anything that sounds like a quick fix. Building more walls might placate the Minutemen but similar tactics failed in Berlin, are failing in Israel, and flies in the face of the American character of hope, openness and decency. Rounding up all 12 million undocumented aliens and sending them home, as Tancredo advocates, is not only loony talk and thoroughly impossible, it would tank our economy.

So what’s left? Probably a compromise that neither side will adore but that will move us past the current state of xenophobia, political posturing, sloganeering and doing nothing. Let’s reject those peddling fear, and instead, support any elected official seeking middle ground.