There are many realities we conservatives wish were or were not so. We wish, for example, to see everybody freed from the indignity of government dependency. We wish this country could have been so lucky as to have been blessed with a President Barry Goldwater. And we wish President Bill Clinton would stop hitting on our moms. 

Conservatives have quite a few qualms on our lists, which might be one explanation as to why Fox News Channel is consistently, every night, the most-watched cable news network.

If we are to be taken seriously, we must acknowledge the unfortunate realities regardless of how unfortunate they may be. The one that comes to my mind, considering recent events, is the reality that Dzokhar Tsarnaev, the younger of the two Boston Marathon bombers, and currently the only living one, is an American citizen.

I don’t want that primate to be an American citizen. I wish it were not true that he, in a showcase of his oh-so-wicked sense of humor, received his citizenship on the eleventh anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks that his fellow Islamic savages committed. 

But he is an American citizen and therefore he does have the right to the benefits guaranteed in the Sixth Amendment: the right to a lawyer in a “speedy” and “public” trial.

We cannot “stand with Rand” in his 13-hour filibuster against the use of drone technology on accused terrorists if they are also American citizens, but then abandon this principle when the Obama administration says basically the same thing regarding trials for accused terrorists who are also American citizens. We would be hypocrites to support one and not the other.

However, we wouldn’t have this dilemma if Dzokhar and his goat-loving brother were never granted citizenship in the first place. What we need is a stricter immigration policy, one with higher standards.

If you’re a foreigner living in Mexico, for example, you can be deported for not being ”physically or mentally healthy,” or if you lack ”necessary funds” for ”sustenance.”

Why shouldn’t America, considering the economic and moral upheaval it’s currently undergoing, adopt Mexico’s deportation laws as its own immigration laws? If you are physically or mentally unhealthy—certainly mentally—what good will you be to our country? If you want to move here but have no way of providing for yourself, why should we take you in? You will just add to our financial burdens, and that affects everyone else.

America simply can’t afford to be letting every single person and his uncle into the country just because they want to, even if they go about it the legal way. We should, at least for the time being, only accept “the best and the brightest.” And especially, in light of our allowing the brother of an Islamist once the subject of an FBI investigation to become a United States citizen on the anniversary of one of America’s bloodiest days (those Islamists are suckers for symbolism), there is really no reason we should have such low standards for our immigrants.