BOSTON -- The court victory that the Obama administration won this week in Arizona will not make the ugly national tension over illegal immigration go away. The president needs to take this brief respite, step back from the Washington logjam and remember what he and every president going back to Ronald Reagan have been trying to achieve.

If he does, he might ask: Why not accept John McCain's 10-point border security plan?

Answer: He should. Now. Or immediately after the Arizona primary election on Aug. 24.

The policy wonk community and pro-immigrant Democrats will object, but they are stuck in a mindset that no longer applies. Rightly or wrongly, the public's patience with illegal immigration has run out. Barack Obama, like George W. Bush before him, has had no choice politically or legally but to enforce the law. The ballooning enforcement budget -- about 10 times larger than in 1993 -- is diminishing the flow of new immigrants.

But it is also forcing Obama to do what he and the other presidents have tried to avoid: deport those unauthorized people who are honest and hardworking, most with families, and integral to the American economy. This year alone, the Obama administration is on track to deport about 400,000 illegal immigrants -- only a small percentage of them real criminals -- out of an estimated population of less than 11 million.

Nearly 5 percent of the nation's work force is made up of unauthorized immigrants. Large parts of agriculture, construction, and the leisure and hospitality industries would risk collapse if workers were deported. According to the Census Bureau, the unauthorized make up 19 percent of building, groundskeeping and maintenance workers; 17 percent of the construction trades; and 12 percent of food preparation and service workers.

It is easy to say that unemployed Americans would fill these jobs, but the economic upheaval to get from here to there -- even if it were possible, which it largely isn't -- would be disastrous at a time when the nation is struggling to recover from deep recession.

Most of these immigrants are now part of us. Some Americans are obsessed with blaming the immigrants for being illegal, but fail to recognize that we as a nation are as guilty as these gardeners, dishwashers, baby sitters, home-care providers and chicken-pluckers. The hiring of unauthorized workers was part of a tacitly accepted labor system begun by farmers in the Southwest in the 1960s and spread by employers and consumers across the country, all acting illegally.

Illegal immigrants helped fuel the great economic expansion of the 1990s and up until 2007. It is true that the shrunken pie caused by the recession now has to be split among more mouths, but that is what you do in a family and community.

Perhaps this is why in polls, most Americans say they want to legalize those here, while backing the Arizona law as a way to stop more from coming. In a CNN/Opinion Research poll released this week, fully 81 percent said they would favor "creating a program that would allow illegal immigrants already living in the United States for a number of years to stay here and apply to legally remain in this country permanently if they had a job and paid back taxes."

Yet Obama remains stuck with his supporters in trying to craft outdated grand bargains that would trade legalization for enforcement that is already being done.

Obama should hold a summit on the border with Southwest senators, accept the plan by McCain and Sen. Jon Kyl, also of Arizona, and say that he is submitting legislation that would lead to legalization. Privately, he should challenge the Southwest Republicans to take credit for the enforcement or be exposed for economic and moral irresponsibility if they continue to demand that enforcement be implemented "first," which their histories suggest they don't actually believe in.

The McCain-Kyl plan calls for 6,000 National Guard troops, more Border Patrol officers, drones and expanding a program that jails repeat border jumpers under criminal charges.

McCain, once vulnerable, now coasts to re-election. He is the Senate linchpin. His plan may be more grandstanding than effective policy, but the alternative is the steady deportation of nearly 11 million people. We would all suffer.