See previous: 2007.05.25 "Just Say No to the Shamnesty" Roundup

Maybe we should stop arguing about deportation vs. amnesty and just apply The First Law Of Holes for a couple of years: "When you're in one, quit diggin'." We're in one. Seal the border, by whatever means necessary, and spend the next couple of years studying the situation. Then, after the borders are sealed maybe it will be time to talk about normalization for those in the country illegally and figure out how many legal immigrants per year it makes sense to admit. Security first, then we'll talk about other things.

Below the fold (newest items at the top):

• Malign Neglect
• How Not to Make an American
• Slow Down and Absorb
• What’s to debate? It’s illegal’
• No photo, no vote? Doh!

*** *** *** Fold (but please don't spindle or mutilate) *** *** ***

Malign Neglect
The amnesty bill does nothing to stop illegal immigration.
By Charles Krauthammer

As the most attractive land for would-be immigrants, America has the equivalent of the first 100 picks in the NBA draft. Yet through lax border control and sheer inertia, it allows those slots to be filled by (with apologies to Bill Buckley) the first 100 names in the San Salvador phone book.

The immigration compromise now being debated in Congress does improve our criteria for selecting legal immigrants. Unfortunately, its inadequacies in dealing with illegal immigration — specifically, ensuring that ten years from now we will not have a new cohort of 12 million demanding amnesty — completely swamp the good done on legal immigration. ...

This is amnesty — and I would be all in favor of it if I believed in the border enforcement mechanisms in this bill. If these are indeed the last illegal immigrants to come in, let us generously and humanely take them out of the shadows. But if we don’t close the border, that generous and humane gesture will be an announcement to the world that the smart way to come to America is illegally. ...

How Not to Make an American
Why does McCain-Kennedy do so little to encourage assimilation?
By Deroy Murdock

To judge how important assimilation is to senators John McCain (R., Ariz.) and Ted Kennedy (D., Mass.), peruse their immigration bill, now before the Senate. “Assimilation” appears only once in this legislation, and not until the 343rd of 347 pages. “Americanization” never shows up.

Too bad the most sweeping immigration measure since 1986 shortchanges assimilation. Whether America ultimately absorbs 12,000 or all 12 million illegal aliens estimated to live here, it will be better for them and this nation if they speak, study, and vote in English, understand America’s Constitution and political culture, respect our history and civic traditions, and honor our flag and national heroes. Otherwise, bedlam awaits.

McCain-Kennedy does little to forestall such cultural disarray, and it probably exacerbates it.

“Patriotic assimilation is a necessary component of any successful immigration policy,” Hudson Institute senior fellow John Fonte told the House Immigration subcommittee on May 16. Unfortunately, “there are no serious assimilation components to the legislation.” ...

Slow Down and Absorb
Open borders? Mass deportations? How about some common sense instead? 
Peggy Noonan

... Naturally I hope the new immigration bill fails. It is less a bill than a big dirty ball of mischief, malfeasance and mendacity, with a touch of class malice, and it's being pushed by a White House that is at once cynical and inept. The bill's Capitol Hill supporters have a great vain popinjay's pride in their own higher compassion. They are inclusive and you're not, you cur, you gun-totin' truckdriver's-hat-wearin' yahoo. It's all so complex, and you'd understand this if you weren't sort of dumb.

But it's not so complex. The past quarter-century an unprecedented wave of illegal immigrants has crossed our borders. The flood is so great that no one--no one--can see or fully imagine all the many implications, all the country-changing facts of it. No one knows exactly what uncontrolled immigration is doing and will do to our country.

So what should we do? 

We should stop, slow down and absorb. We should sit and settle. We should do what you do after eating an eight-course meal. We should digest what we've eaten.

We should close our borders. We should do whatever it takes to close them tight and solid. Will that take the Army? Then send the Army. Does it mean building a wall? Then build a wall, but the wall must have doors, which can be opened a little or a lot down the road once we know where we are. Should all legal immigration stop? No. We should make a list of what our nation needs, such as engineers and nurses, and then admit a lot of engineers and nurses. We should take in what we need to survive and flourish.

As we end illegal immigration, we should set ourselves to the Americanization of the immigrants we have. They haven't only joined a place of riches, it's a place of meaning. We must teach them what it is they've joined and why it is good and what is expected of them and what is owed. We stopped Americanizing ourselves 40 years ago. We've got to start telling the story of our country again.

As to the eight or 10 or 12 or 14 million illegals who are here--how interesting that our government doesn't know the number--we should do nothing dramatic or fraught or unlike us. We should debate what to do, at length. Debate isn't bad. There's a lot to say. We can all join in. We should do nothing extreme, only things that are commonsensical.  ...

"What’s to debate? It’s illegal".
Don Surber (H/T: DS)

Ready for the world’s shortest column on illegal immigration? The late Sonny Bono, a Republican congressman from California once said, “What’s to debate? It’s illegal.”

I tip my cap to Stacy McCain of the Washington Times for that quote.

Of course, the boss expects a little longer interpretation of the news than that.

It is not like Bono was a callous millionaire. His parents were poor Sicilian immigrants. He waited tables, worked in construction and drove a truck before leaving Detroit for Hollywood.

Bono understood the issue better than Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., who has been pushing immigration “reform” for more than 40 years now.

Kennedy was behind the 1965 immigration reform act, which eliminated the national origins quotas.

“A nation’s willingness to reform past errors of judgment by reforming public policy is a measure of its greatness,” Kennedy said at the time.

Then came the “refugee reform” act of 1980, signed into law by President Carter.

Within six years, the nation had 3 million illegal immigrants. Kennedy’s solution? Amnesty. And President Reagan signed that into law in 1986.

Today, there are 12 million illegal immigrants in the nation. ...

No photo, no vote? Doh!
Quin Hillyer (H/T: Lorie Byrd)

WASHINGTON  - Nobody argues against the government’s right to require that airplane passengers show a photographic identification; yet when government tries to impose the same reasonable requirement on voters, liberal lawyers and activists scream bloody murder.

So it is that when the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 in January (and effectively affirmed the decision by denial of a rehearing in April) that Indiana was within its rights to require photo IDs at the polls, the state Democratic Party and would-be voters represented by the ACLU decided (just last week) to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse the decision.

But the U.S. Constitution gives to state legislatures the responsibility to “prescribe” the “times, places and manner of holding elections,” and the high court has consistently held that states have the right to impose regulations on voting in order to ensure the integrity and fairness of the balloting. ...