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Amnesty Bill Not Dead Yet

June 15, 2007

Just when I was sighing with relief that the ill-conceived, poorly designed, nonsensical Ted Kennedy - John McCain amnesty bill had died a deserved death on the Senate Floor, it appears that it's about to be resurrected. Like a zombie from a B horror movie, this monster simply will not die.

Senate leaders announced plans Thursday night to revive the White House-backed measure as early as next week, although neither Majority Leader Harry Reid nor his GOP counterpart, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, issued any predictions the bill ultimately would pass.

Instead, they issued a statement that said in its entirety: "We met this evening with several of the senators involved in the immigration bill negotiations. Based on that discussion, the immigration bill will return to the Senate floor after completion" of sweeping energy legislation that has occupied the Senate this week.

There was no immediate reaction from the bill's numerous Senate critics, who have consistently attacked the legislation as conferring amnesty on the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants living in the country. At the White House, spokesman Scott Stanzel said, "We are encouraged by the announcement from Senate leaders that comprehensive immigration reform will be brought back up for consideration."

The immigration legislation's revival represented at least an interim victory for President Bush, who returned home from Europe earlier in the week and plunged into a campaign to rescue his top domestic priority. On Tuesday, the president made a rare visit to the Capitol to ask Republican senators to give the bill a second chance. Two days later, responding to a request from pivotal GOP senators, he threw his support behind $4.4 billion in immediate funding for "securing our borders and enforcing our laws at the work site." As drafted, the legislation called for the money to become available over a period of several years.

Under a plan that key lawmakers presented to Reid and McConnell, Republicans and Democrats each will have 10-12 opportunities to amend the measure, with the hope that they will then combine to provide the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster by die-hard opponents.

We have federal immigration laws that are not being enforced. We have Americans who can't get jobs because illegal workers will take half the pay and no benefits. We have a porous border through which terrorists can easily slip. And we have the Mexican government which refuses to address the social inequities in its country that are the root cause of this problem. Poverty and the hiring in Mexico of South American immigrants are root causes of the immigration wave of desperate people who are easily exploited by human traffickers. The Mexican government has said that it has to hire immigrants from Central and South America to "do the jobs that Mexicans won't do." Sound familiar?

This ludicrous patchwork amnesty bill -- and make no mistake, it is an amnesty bill -- rewards illegal behavior, penalizes immigrants who have followed the rules and contains language that will allow immigration authorities to violate current privacy laws which prevent them from seeing the tax returns of Americans. It's a mess and it is only going to make things worse.

President Bush is dead wrong when he says we must have immigration legislation. We don't need any legislation at all. We need to enforce the laws we have and get tough with Mexico. Our neighbor to the South is actively working to destabilize our economy, because it doesn't want to take care of its own poor people. Increased drug trafficking and violence have also contributed to the problem. The policies of the Mexican government need to be addressed before we even think about drafting new immigration legislation.

A recent Rasmussen poll shows only 20% of Americans think that the bill should be revived in its present form. Not that our president, Ted Kennedy or John McCain cares what we think, of course.

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