You have to feel sorry for those poor saps in Arizona. There they are seeing all kinds of problems from illegal immigration. Crime is up. Demand for government services like education and health is up. There ought to be a law against it!

Suddenly it dawned on the people of Arizona that there is a law prohibiting people from entering the country without a valid visa. So let’s enforce that law, they said, and passed SB1070, requiring law enforcement officials to enforce the federal law.

For doing what they thought was both right and good, the residents of the Arizona have been branded pariahs. What they forgot was to do what was smart.

Now the people of Utah – and I never thought I would be saying this – are doing what is smart. They are separating the issue of the need for foreign workers from the issue of immigration. Though we have always treated these two issues as one, they are, in fact, very different.

Utah’s plan is to make work permits readily available to foreign workers. The state could thus screen, tax and track the workers. Only people coming to work would receive the permit; families would be left at home. The permit would be for a defined period and would allow workers to return home for visits with their families.

It’s a pretty good idea. And it comes from the most Republican state in the country.

Alas, I don’t expect the Utah plan to go very far. After all, how can a state supersede the authority of the United States government and issue its own work permits? It is an elegant solution, and a smart one, but by itself it is unlikely to go anywhere.

It may, however, change the debate. It is time that we stopped talking about immigration reform and started talking about work visas. This will be hard. We are, after all, a nation of immigrants and we have this idea that everyone else in the world is just dying to raise their kids as Americans.

Truth be told, if you have some money there are a lot of places around the world that are very nice to live in. With money you can get your kids a decent education and healthcare.

Most people come to the U.S. to make money to send home and plan to go back. At first they think their stay is temporary. Then, because they know they won’t get back in if they go for a visit, they just stay and stay and eventually become immigrants. Work permits would allow them to be the short-term workers that they want to be.

But what if we just solve the problem by doing without all these workers? Won’t this also solve unemployment in our country? If it weren’t for all these illegals, couldn’t we put our own unemployed back to work?

How many of you mow your own lawn? When was the last time you painted your own house? Which of you would encourage your children to spend their summers doing back-breaking work on a farm? I actually sent my son to Colorado several years ago to spend the summer working on our family sod farm. He still hasn’t forgiven me for the experience.

The work performed by people who are in this country illegally is critical to our economy. No one else is going to do the work they do. So if we need them, isn’t the Utah solution the more sensible option?

There is an old rule that says if the majority of people are going to do something whether or not it is legal, it is both sensible and more efficient to make it legal, tax it and make money off it rather than spend money fighting it. I take my hat off to Utah for seeing this.