Read this and tell me: How does it make you feel?

“America, love it or leave it.”

If you’re under 50, you may have no reaction at all. But if you grew up in the ‘60s, as I did, my guess is that you can’t say those words without feeling some sort of visceral punch -- a flashback to the era of civil rights and Vietnam, drugs and war protests, and that emerging phenomenon called the counterculture.

I thought about that line and its deceptive simplicity (of course, if you didn’t like a place -- be it a city, state, or country -- you would probably leave if you could) when seeing a bumper sticker on a pickup truck in Prince William County, Va., last spring. The driver had come to a public hearing on a controversial new law aimed at ridding Prince William -- its homes, its businesses, and its schools -- of undocumented immigrants.

It said: “What part of ‘illegal’ do you not understand?”

Like the quote from the ‘60s, this one carries the same air of certainty and simplicity -- to which I wanted to reply “Yes, but….”

Yes, many of the foreign workers and their families are illegal, but do you want to deport them all? How will you do that? What impact will that have on their communities? Their families? Their children?

My story on the Prince William controversy and its effect on the public schools is in the September issue of ASBJ, part of a special report titled “Immigration and Diversity,” which will be online Wednesday at www.asbj.com. Other editors have written on dramatic demographic changes facing schools in other parts of the country, in states like Maine, Arizona, Georgia, and Minnesota.

The promises of this new diversity are as considerable as its challenges. As citizens, we’ll disagree on what steps to take to both secure our borders and adjust to life as a nation of minorities, which, come 2042, the United States will be.

But one thing is certain: These solutions -- whatever they prove to be -- won’t fit on a bumper sticker.

Lawrence Hardy, Senior Editor