A judge has upheld an Arizona law which requires proof of citizenship for welfare benefits.

It seems so simple, doesn't it? Who but a citizen is entitled to the benefits of citizenship? So then what do we do about immigration?

The President has a plan, scoffed at by defeatists, which the Tucson Citizen finds hopeful:

President Bush this week had hopeful words for those seeking serious immigration reform.

In a news conference, Bush renewed his call for a guest worker program for immigrants seeking legal employment in the United States. "We want our Border Patrol agents chasing crooks and thieves and drug runners and terrorists, not good-hearted people who are coming here to work," the president said.

Bush also said he wants to "stop the process of people feeling like they've got to walk miles across desert in Arizona and Texas in order just to feed their family, and they find them dead out there."

This will not be an easy political battle. But it is extremely encouraging to hear that the president is ready and willing to start the national discussion.

This plan, it seems to me, has a pedigree:

As the Greek polis evolved it sought to differentiate, amongst its inhabitants, between insiders and outsiders. Insiders par excellence were its own members, the citizens; palpable outsiders were its slaves, indigenous or imported; but this simple dichotomy would have sufficed only for communities like Sparta which discouraged immigration. Elsewhere it was necessary to recognize free persons who lived, temporarily or permanently, in the polis without becoming its citizens. ... The precise nature and complexity of metic-status doubtless varied from place to place; evidence approaches adequacy only for Athens, atypical in its allure and, consequently, the numbers of those who succumbed thereto (half the size of the (reduced) citizen body of c.313 BC (Ath. 272c); perhaps proportionately larger in the 5th cent. BC (R. Duncan-Jones, Chiron 1980, 101 ff.) ). With Solon having created only indirect incentives to immigration, Athenian metic-status probably owes its formal origins to Cleisthenes (2), after whom the presence of metics was recognized in law and could develop in its details at both city and local (deme) level. ... Socio-economically, Athens' metics were highly diverse, and contemporary attitudes to their presence deeply ambivalent.

(excerpted from David Whitehead's entry on metics in the Oxford Classical Dictionary)

That sounds about right. Except for the slavery part.