Illegal immigration is obviously a hot button issue in San Diego. The term "illegal" was used 163 times in the Letters section of the North County Times over a recent 30-day period. In virtually every incidence, "illegal" was used to describe immigrants. The question often posed by frustrated writers was, and still is: "What part of 'illegal' don't you understand?" Actually, there's a lot I don't understand about "illegal."

It is illegal in California to eat oranges in a bathtub, and for animals to mate within 1,500 feet of a tavern, school or place of worship. As Dave Barry would say: "I am not making this up." In Indiana, it's illegal to throw a rock at a bird -- a law, which if strictly enforced, could give every boy in Indianapolis a criminal record by the time he is 10. These legal trivia are offered just to remind us of Winston Churchill's advice: "If you make 10,000 laws, it only destroys respect for the law."

Our laws have more Americans in prison for drug offenses than for crimes against people and property. The same interstate commerce law that makes it illegal to grow cannabis could, technically, get you arrested for growing your own tomatoes. Our lawmakers have debased the value of our money to the point where they found it necessary to make it illegal for citizens to melt down coins for the metallic value.

Frederic Bastiat, author of "The Law," wrote: "When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law." If legislators don't respect the law, why should citizens respect the law? Moreover, why should citizens respect legislators who have apparently lost their moral sense?

Most of us were taught that stealing is both illegal and immoral. But when our lawmakers decide to take the earnings from one citizen and give them to another citizen, they call it "redistribution" instead of stealing, and it becomes "legal." Then, they call their redistribution "welfare," apparently secure in the assumption that their constituents will confuse that term with the moral concept of "charity."

So, with regard to illegal immigration, let me see if I have this right: People come to America from as far away as Guatemala and Honduras to pick crops, do gardening, make beds, wash dishes and do other jobs that American citizens find less attractive than living on welfare. But when job-seeking immigrants decide to avail themselves of that same welfare system, they are deemed a social burden. Do other readers see a common denominator here? Isn't this whole welfare concept an indication of "losing one's moral sense"?

Henry David Thoreau said, "We should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right." How true.

- Grant W. Kuhns lives in Carlsbad.