The show must go on - unless you can’t find the foreign seasonal workers needed to keep your circus going.

Circus Chimera, whose shows have been mainstays in South Texas for any number of yeras, has canceled its itinerary for the first time in its 10-year history. It isn’t a lack of performing members - human or of the animal variety - that is shutting the circus down. Nope, it’s that immigration crisis you hear about from the political types that got the job done, or this case didn’t get the jobs done.

The collective inability of our fearless leaders in Washington to reform our nation’s immigration system to fit economic and business realities did Circus Chimera in. In one piece of a complicated political puzzle that Washington can’t solve, a key provision in a  temporary worker visa program expired in September 2007, and was never renewed.

The net result is that the circus company was not able to bring in the temporary workers it needed to do such necessary jobs as setting up benches and selling tickets. The circus company has always gone the legal route, participating in the H-2B visa program in bringing in the temporary and seasonal workers it needed, (from Mexico), but this year without an extension of the program, Circus Chimera could not go on.

“If employers can’t secure visas through a legal route, then they’ll have to hire undocumented workers if they want to stay in business,” said John Meredith, who works with the the amusement industry on a national level in matters involving employment issues.

Meredith, in making his comments last week to The Brownsville Herald, noted that it’s not only the smaller shows that will be affected by immigration stalemate in Washington, but the larger productions as well, such as the Houston Livestock Show. Meredith predicts the Houston show will be significantly smaller this year due to the lack of legal workers once provided by the visa program.

The U.S. economy has always had a need for immigrant workers. There is no shame in stating such a basic fact, so it ought to be a logical progression for our federal government to create the necessary legal slots for workers to be gainfully employed in the various industries where such workers are needed.

But when dealing with immigration, the matters of race, culture and language kick in, so the simple matter of having enough circus workers, for example, becomes a complicated venture. If one states that he or she is not against immigration, just illegal immigration, then what should be the problem with a Circus Chimera going through the proper legal channels to employ the workers it needs?

Such is the chaos of the immigration issue in this country right now that the political supersedes the practical, hurting businesses that simply ask the federal government to establish basic visa programs that will allow them to operate by the rules and continue their legitimate business ventures.

Seal the border? That’s the cry of immigration restrictionists in exotic locales like Iowa and New Hampshire, but they have not a clue of how such a thing could be done. Nor they have any idea of the volume of business and commerce that crosses both of our borders - to the north as well as the south - and how important that flow is to the lives and livelihoods of many good Americans.