CHASING PEOPLE WE CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT ENDING U.S. HYPOCRISY REQUIRES JUSTICE FOR OUR LOW-END LABORERS.

Byline: Joseph Honig Local View

GEORGE W. Bush may have spent the past week grappling with global economics, touring Europe and dining with Britain's royalty - our world's most celebrated welfare family - but back at the White House, the president's men said they would consider ways to ``regularize'' the treatment of the people who clean our homes.

And wash our cars. And paint our living rooms. And care for our children.

The millions upon millions of not-so-hidden souls we call illegal immigrants.

For despite his own Hispanic family ties - a brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, is married to a former Mexican national - the president is an also-ran when it comes to grabbing votes from Americans with ancestors in Guadalajara and Oaxaca. Though some Latinos can't get enough of him - Miami's rightist Cubans believe George W. Bush is Fidel Castro's worst enemy - most are what political operators call DNA Democrats, traditional left voters.

But whether this administration acts out of cynicism or compassion - earlier suggestions of an ``automatic'' amnesty were hurriedly quashed - Mexican laborers in California and the nation deserve an end to their now permanent status of chaos and shame.

They've earned it. They have worked long hours far beneath minimum wages for often unscrupulous employers. They have stood silent in the face of inhumane housing and job conditions, afraid to complain for fear of deportation.

They have poured fortunes into our stores and banks and governments; the Social Security system is awash with fictitious accounts created to satisfy employers.

And they have made California a lush, comforting land where your meal is cooked, your coffee is poured and your dishes are washed without complaint.

To say that these terribly hard-working immigrants should continue to labor in fear is to make all of us complicit in a cruel exploitation of the weak.

To nod and and shrug about the inevitability of hard, poor lives lived outside the law demeans our own dignity.

We owe them something better than what they have. We owe ourselves the essential peace of mind that goes with treating the least of us with something on the order of respect.

Almost 40 years ago, the Johnson administration ran, for better or worse, a guest worker program. Legal Mexican ``braceros'' came north to pick our vegetables and can our fruit. It wasn't a great deal - many were nonetheless victimized - but it wasn't disastrously oppressive. They needed our work and we needed their hands.

In ensuing years the legislation ran out, the work continued and Washington told us 3 million Mexican men and women had made their ways past virtually collapsible borders. There may even be 10 million. Or more.

They arrive because their countrymen make $3 a day at home, maybe $12 if they work in an American-owned factory inside Mexico. And though they clean our toilets and yards, xenophobes continue to declare they must be sent back. To what, they ask. To starve, no one answers.

Even George W. Bush knows we are not overrun with illegal aliens. Such immigration surely seeks its own level; when minimum wage jobs dry up - if they ever do - Mexicans will stop coming. They are poor but they are not stupid.

It is time to applaud some Republican thinkers for saying what everybody knows but what few Americans want to acknowledge: We spend too much money and time chasing people we can't live without.

No, it is not appropriate to make each and every illegal Mexican worker a citizen - or even eligible for citizenship. We have simply arrived at that moment when hypocrisy makes even the most constitutionally correct Americans - a president among them - blanch.

In the end, we must pay for our prosperity, for our comforts, for the needs of a service economy hungry for low-end labor. Certainly, a fair price includes allowing poor workers to toil with heads held high.