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An amnesty by any other name still stinks
Well, what is there left to say? In '92 we elected our first black President and eight years later we elected our first Mexican. Who says this country ain't diverse?
See previous: An amnestia by any other name ...
Below the fold:
- David Frum: Immigration Thoughts
- Getting To The Fine Print Of Immigration
- Summary Of The Fine Print Read
- Illegals bill sinks Bush job approval
- Pelosi: What this bill needs is a whole lot more amnesty
- Dissecting the Bush/Kennedy shamnesty bill
*** *** *** Fold (but please don't spindle or mutilate) *** *** *** Immigration Thoughts
David Frum
With the immigration * compromise * in the Senate, President Bush and the Senators have detonated the slow-motion trigger on a Republican debacle in 2008. Let's count the ways:
1) The typical (median) American worker has seen his income stagnate under George W. Bush. Immigration is not the only reason for this wage stagnation, but it is certainly one of the reasons. With this immigration bill, the GOP is telling hard-pressed workers: Go look to somebody else to help you.
2) As complicated as this immigration deal is, it rests on a simple compromise: The Democrats get the amnesty they want - in exchange for the Republicans getting the guest-worker program they want. By identifying the guestworker program as the GOP's highest immigration priority, the deal also identifies the GOP as a party that in the crunch puts employers' interests first.
3) Even before the deal, Democrats entered the 2008 cycle unified and energized; Republicans, divided and demoralized. The president and the senators have now managed to divide and demoralize their party even further.
4) ...
Nice work, guys.
*** Getting To The Fine Print Of Immigration
Ed Morrissey
As CQ readers know, I stressed the importance of keeping an open mind about the new immigration-reform compromise. With a minority in Congress and a legalization advocate in the White House, we would be lucky to get something that included any kind of border security at all. Jon Kyl and other conservative Republicans fought to get us the best deal they could, and their recommendation (especially Kyl's) should carry a lot of weight. That doesn't mean we have to just accept whatever is thrown at us, but it does mean we should examine it carefully before rejecting it out of hand -- and see if we can use this as a good start, because the status quo is unacceptable.
A few details have arisen over the weekend, however, that make me more uncomfortable with the compromise. ...
These problems amount to deal-killers, in my opinion. I'm on board conceptually, but this compromise needs a lot of work and amending in the Senate. National security requires that we find a solution as quickly as possible, but we need to peruse every single clause in this bill to make sure it matches the description given to the American public last Thursday. So far, it appears to fall short.
*** Summary Of The Fine Print Read
Hugh Hewitt
I have spent a lot of my weekend reading the draft bill as was requested by both Jon Kyl and Tony Snow, and not just of me, but of all critics. Here are the relevant posts in order of their appearance:
There are so many problems with this bill that it should not be introduced in the Senate absent a period of open hearings on it and the solicitation of expert opinion from various analysts across the ideological spectrum. Even were it somehow to improbably make its way to the president's desk, if it does so before these problems are aired and confronted, the Congress would be inviting a monumental distrust of the institution. There is simply too much here to say "Trust us," and move on. The jam down of such a far reaching measure, drafted in secret and very difficult for laymen much less lawyers to read, is fundamentally inconsistent with how we govern ourselves.
*** Illegals bill sinks Bush job approval
By Stephen Dinan
President Bush yesterday used his weekly radio address to urge listeners to support the immigration deal reached by a handful of senators last week, even as new poll numbers showed the immigration issue is hurting Mr. Bush's job-approval ratings.
The president has invested heavily in getting an immigration bill passed and signed this year, calling it one of his top priorities after Democrats won control of Congress in November. ...
Meanwhile, a new Rasmussen Reports poll found Mr. Bush's approval rating dropped to an all-time low for that poll, at 34 percent.
"The president's ratings have tumbled each time immigration reform dominates the news," Scott Rasmussen, president of Rasmussen Reports, said in his analysis.
Mr. Rasmussen said that his polling last year, after Mr. Bush gave an Oval Office address laying out his plans for more border enforcement and giving illegal aliens a path to citizenship, found only 39 percent supported the president's position.
*** Pelosi: What this bill needs is a whole lot more amnesty
Allahpundit
One of the few good, if nonsensical, provisions of the bill is the new “points system” that replaces automatic amnesty for extended families with a merit-based metric. Granted, it’s idiotic to give preference to skilled illegals when the whole purpose of the bill is to provide unskilled labor (the “jobs Americans won’t do,” remember?), but I guess we take our victories where we find them.
Naturally, Pelosi’s going to try to roll that back once the bill gets to her. Why settle for five million new Democratic voters when she can make it 10 or 20? “I have serious objection to the point system that is in the bill now,” the speaker said on ABC’s This Week. “Yes, we should deal with the backlog [of workers seeking citizenship]. I completely agree with that. But the family unification principles which had been fundamental to American immigration are disrupted by what is in there now.” ...
“We’re about families and family values,” Pelosi added. “And having people coming and going, taking their children out of school and being separated from them - we should try to fashion something that recognizes the reality of life.”
With Democrats working at cross-purposes from organized labor and Republican hardliners looking to impose harsh penalties on big business, the immigration debate is now sufficiently absurd that I guess the abortion party can get away with calling itself pro-family.
On the bright side: Pelosi’s concerns could have a significant impact on the success of the legislation as the House takes up the bill. Any significant tinkering with the legislation in the House could spell disaster for the fragile bipartisan coalition supporting the bill in the Senate.
*** Dissecting the Bush/Kennedy shamnesty bill
Michelle Malkin
I've been hacking away at it all weekend and will post analysis tomorrow.
Hugh Hewitt has a seven-part dissection here and writes: "The jam down of such a far reaching measure, drafted in secret and very difficult for laymen much less lawyers to read, is fundamentally inconsistent with how we govern ourselves."
The invaluable N.Z. Bear has taken the bill text and converted it into an annotation/link-friendly format that allows readers to browse page-by-page, allows bloggers to link directly to individual pages, and allows anybody to add commentary and links to individual pages.
Go here. Read it, use it, link and add your comments! ...
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