Jiamei Tian, the disturbed woman who sprayed green paint on the Lincoln Memorial and other treasured sites in Washington, is an illegal alien. (She is a Chinese national and a visa-abuser; though the media uses softer terms, such as the fact that she has an expired visa.)

The storied high school valedictorian that we hear so much about, the Mexican teenager who wants to attend medical school so that he can help the poor, is also an illegal alien.

Both narratives are gripping and both are totally beside the point.

In just about any large population, such as that of the illegal aliens, there will be outstanding individuals — the odd genius and the odd master criminal. We cannot build public policy around such rarities, on either end of the spectrum.

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) got in hot water when he tried to make this point in an overly colorful way when he compared the number of high school valedictorians to the number of teenage drug mules, both among the illegal alien population; he said that there were more drug couriers than valedictorians, and he is right. (King's prior colorful statements, incidentally, did not help him this time around.)

But numbers not only do count, they should be the only metric used in a conversation about 11 million illegal aliens now in the country, most of whom would be legalized should the Gang of Eight's S.744 to become law.

Should we reward individuals who broke our laws with immediate legal status, and green cards some years later? More important, should we set in motion another precedent (like IRCA in the 1980s) that will continue to bring millions upon millions of additional illegal aliens to this country?

Those are the questions before us, and we should not be swayed, in either direction, by either Ms. Tian or that valedictorian.