While the heat and rhetoric of a presidential campaign can at times seem unnecessarily mean-spirited, it is a blessing to have immigration reform still front-and-center in the public mind.

Is there any common ground in these competing voices?

Yes, there is a healthy emerging consensus that immigration is desirable – if it’s legal. That was not always well understood.

At long last, ugly nativism seems to be behind us. Responsible voices in both parties are now dedicated not to stopping immigration but to ensuring its lawfulness.

Unfortunately, some candidates do hold onto the notion that the best reform is either simply to hike up the penalties on employers of illegal immigrants or to create a patchwork of benefits that overlooks illegality.

It is just as irresponsible to set artificially low ceilings on lawful immigration (thereby creating agricultural or corporate labor shortages) as it is to tolerate or promote a haphazard patchwork of benefits for illegal immigrants.

Meeting one inequality with another only breeds resentment, and worse, does nothing to address the immediate need for reform.

So what to do?

First, raise the artificially low immigration quotas. In many parts of the country there are low-skilled, medium-skilled and high-skilled job shortages. This is especially true in parts of the heartland where the population is aging rapidly and badly needs workers in both agriculture and industry.

It’s not rocket science: Determine the unmet demand for jobs, and let that many into the country. For those already here and who came unlawfully, the path to citizenship would involve a realistic fine (which in appropriate circumstances might be paid with community service), learning English and staying on the right side of the law.

Despite all the noisy bombast of talk-radio hosts, this is what most Americans want. Certainly, Catholics drawing inspiration from the tradition of the “preferential option for the poor” earnestly desire a public leader capable of charting a way for people to escape poverty, to fill important yet unfilled jobs and to live safely out of the shadows of exploitation.

Of course, it would also be nice if all the false anxiety over “amnesty” would stop too. No one really thinks it’s credible to ship out 15 million illegal immigrants, the great majority of whom have never been in trouble.

There is one legal anomaly that does deserve remedy, and it is the failure to recognize that the Constitution never envisioned “citizenship without allegiance.”

With apologies to Bruce Springsteen, just being “born in the U.S.A.” is not enough. The 14th Amendment requires birth (or naturalization) and a pledge of allegiance.

In the words of the Constitution, “all persons born ... and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” are citizens. That last bit of phrasing is not surplusage, and in context it means not just abiding by the traffic laws but also not owing allegiance to any foreign state.

Going forward, the Congress and the court might make an attempt to get that straight – a clarification which in itself would likely be a better security fence than the one being constructed in the desert.

It is neither Catholic nor American to separate families, condemn people to a life of poverty under the thumb of the unscrupulous or to identify people as criminals merely because of their country of origin.

In the arc of the Christmas season, the arrival of the Magi reminds us yet again of the need to welcome the stranger.

In scarcely any liturgical time at all, the infant we find so precious to adore now in the light of the Bethlehem star will instruct: “What you do to the least of my brothers, you do to me.”

Let us welcome the new year by choosing leaders who will hold us accountable as a nation to proudly remember Christ’s instruction.

Douglas W. Kmiec, who writes a syndicated column for Catholic News Service, is a professor of constitutional law at Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif.