Legislative travesty in the Senate

Rich Lowry:

The Senate is being praised for its bipartisan stewardship of a “comprehensive” immigration bill to passage. Supporters of the bill never discuss it without that adjective, which is supposed to denote a courageous commitment to solving the immigration problem in its totality. What comprehensive means in this context, however, is dishonest, unworkable, and radical.

The Senate bill pretends to do what it doesn’t truly intend to do—tighten up enforcement—while really doing what its supporters hope no one will notice: conducting a vast social experiment that involves extending the benefits of the welfare state of the world’s richest country to tens of millions of poor, uneducated inhabitants of Latin America, through the expedient of importing them into America.

The Senate bill—which the House, thankfully, is resisting—requires that a system for employers to verify the legal status of employees be created in 18 months. That sounds admirably rapid. Only it’s a fantasy. The people who will be charged with meeting the deadline at the Department of Homeland Security told the Senate prior to passage that it couldn’t possibly happen. The Senate went ahead anyway because what it values most is the facsimile of enforcement.

The 18-month requirement will surely be another in a long line of blown enforcement deadlines. The real intent of the senators is clear from their rejection of the idea of waiting to see enforcement measures actually implemented before doing anything else. Local law enforcement is effectively prohibited from enforcing immigration laws, and an illegal alien can’t be deported so long as he has a claim to stay that is being adjudicated. This can mean an indefinite stay; claims are still being adjudicated from the 1986 amnesty.

The Senate’s attitude is, to paraphrase St. Augustine’s famous prayer, “Oh, Lord, give us immigration enforcement—just not yet.”

...
There follows a discussion on amensty or something like it. The test for whether it is amnesty should be whether what the senate proposes is easier, quicker and cheaper than the current system of legal immigration. By that standard, it is amnesty.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more

Bin Laden's concern about Zarqawi's remains

James Robbins: ... Bin Laden suggests that President Bush should allow Zarqawi’s body to be returned to his family in Jordan, but this is a matter that is up to the Jordanian government, which so far has not shown much interest in facilitating a homecoming. Bin Laden mocks King Abdullah II, calling him a Coalition minion, and asking “w hat scares you about Abu Musab after he’s dead? You know that his funeral, if allowed to happen, would be a huge funeral showing the extent of sympathy with the mujahedin.” A large crowd would definitely turn out, though most people would be on hand to demonstrate their anger and disgust. Last November’s hotel bombings in Amman , masterminded by Zarqawi, are still fresh in people’s memory, and mentioning them to Jordanians has the same visceral impact as memory of the 9/11 attacks does here. Jordan has adopted a zero-tolerance policy towards those who choose to mourn the country’s least favorite son, and four opposition members of parliament who paid con
Read more