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In the southern California countryside, Shellie Milne's children play on their two miniature ponies in their yard. She's just back from a Tea Party meeting: she's an enthusiastic organiser for the movement and she says her latest cause is immigration.

She's insistent that the organisation isn't about social conservatism but is purely about fiscal rectitude. How then does immigration fit into that?

She has six children and says her children's education is suffering directly because of illegal immigration. Many of the children don't speak English and even the children of illegal immigrants must, by law, be educated in the state system.

She adds that the health system is also over-burdened. Of course, there's no national health system here but hospitals do have to treat anyone who turns up in the emergency room. If they can't pay, the hospital foots the bill. Shellie says its like a party. If 30 people RSVP and you cater for that number and then 100 turn up, everybody goes short. It's not much of a party any more.

Her solution? Illegal immigrants should be deported or go to the back of the queue.

But the US needs immigrants who learn the language and are willing to fit in and there should be a much better system to turn them into Americans.

She says in opposing the Arizona law, President Barack Obama has behaved like a dictator, ignoring the will of the majority of people in the state and the country.

That you'd expect. But the president isn't popular with his own natural supporters either.

Angelica Salas, of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, says she's disappointed with President Barack Obama. She tells me that she expected it to be an uphill struggle to get the positive advances they wanted, but not to be on the defensive.

She says that the Obama administration will deport 400,000 illegal immigrants this year, much higher than the figure under George W Bush. She quotes Mr Obama's campaign promised not to rip a child from its mother and says he is now doing exactly that.

Immigrant rights' groups want a much more straightforward process of legal immigration, saying that America needs new workers from all over the world. More controversially, they want all 11 million illegal immigrants in the country to be allowed to turn into American citizens.

But, I ask, isn't it a problem having 11 million working in the States illegally? Angelica Salas agrees that it is, that is why she wants them to be legal. She says it creates all sort of problems, from people being the victims of bad bosses, to not reporting crimes against them. She says the best way to beat the criminals down at the border is to take away the heart of their trade, the smuggling of people across the border.

But the proposed new law, she says, is a threat to anyone who looks Mexican, even if they are, like her, naturalised American citizens.

But what really annoys her is that she believes politicians are busy using the issue to grab votes for the mid-term elections rather than trying to solve a real and knotty problem.

It strikes me there's more than a grain of truth to this. The two women I have spoken to today are poles apart politically. But both agree the current position is costly and wrong. Both think that there should be a simpler route to legal immigration.

There is no certainty that, if they were sat down in a room, they could reach any agreement. But it does seem sure the politicians on Capitol Hill have no interest in finding a workable compromise.

You can watch Mark's report from California on the ´óÏó´«Ã½ News at Ten on Thursday.

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