By TOM TANCREDO | 6/24/11 6:19 AM EDT
I’m the first to acknowledge that among the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States, many are hardworking, law-abiding members of our society. A very small percentage were brought here by their parents, and did not choose to break the law themselves.

The media endlessly reports on these hard cases to implicitly — and sometimes explicitly — promote bad laws, like the DREAM Act and in-state tuition for illegal immigrants.

The latest of these hard cases involves the former Washington Post reporter Jose Antonio Vargas, who revealed he was an illegal immigrant in a new New York Times Magazine article.

His account is compelling. Vargas is a Philippines native. His parents sent him at age 12 to live with his grandparents in the U.S., in 1993 He excelled in school, went to college and pursued a career in journalism — eventually sharing a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings. He did not know he was here illegally until age 16, when he applied for a driver’s license.

By revealing himself to be an illegal immigrant, Vargas has won praise from liberal immigration advocates. A blogger for the San Francisco Chronicle called it, the “most courageous act I’ve seen in quite a whileâ€