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May 21, 2007
Pick a Side and Make a Good Faith Effort to Offend Someone
Senate negotiators spent countless hours over the past several weeks to come up with an immigration proposal that absolutely everyone hates.
Illegal aliens and their advocates think it imposes too many burdens and is not a generous enough amnesty; most of the rest of the population think it's just plain amnesty. Low-skill industries are pleased with 400,000 new guest workers they'd be getting every year; high skill employers think it leaves them out in the cold, while labor unions are unhappy that guest workers will not have a path to citizenship. Business groups, generally, object to a proposed work verification procedure that they would be required to follow, while most everyone else is skeptical that the government will ever sufficiently get its act together in order to come up with a verification process in the first place. Ethnic advocacy groups are screaming about the de-emphasis on extended family reunification in the future; public advocacy groups think the plan will change very little and expand family chain migration. Illegal aliens and the Mexican government are worried about the enforcement provisions of the bill; ordinary Americans believe they are being lied to yet again.
Met with near universal disdain, the authors of the Senate bill have decided that the criticism is actually a compliment. Since they have managed to offend just about everyone, they have determined that they must have come up with one heck of a bill. If nobody's happy, then the bill contains tough medicine for everyone to swallow and is an indication of their political courage.
Or, it might just be a really bad bill.
Here's an idea: Pick a side in this debate and then offend the other guy completely. Make him scream obscenities at you - call you a traitor, or a racist, or a liar. Be bold.
If you want an amnesty have an amnesty. That means for everyone - no conditions. Just fill out an application and you're in. Heck, just skip the application all together, who cares? If you want cheap labor, then tell employers they're free to hire anyone they want, anywhere on the face of the planet. Just get it over with and level with the American public rather than whisper sweet-nothings in their ears while you draw it out. Give Ted Kennedy some credit. That's exactly what he is prepared to do.
If you want to enforce immigration laws, then just enforce them. No bargaining with the people who broke the law, no backroom deals with businesses seeking exemptions so they can get their cheap foreign workers - just a zero tolerance policy for illegal aliens and their employers. Build a fence along the border, issue everyone an electronically verifiable Social Security card with biometric features, put a few scofflaw employers in jail to send the rest of them a message, end birth right citizenship for the children of illegal aliens, and let the chips fall where they may. They may not like you, they'll call you every name in the book, but at least they'll respect you.
We've tried half-hearted measure in the past and they don't work. We've tried to please everyone, or offend everyone equally and that doesn't work. Let's just get it over with: One bill for all the marbles. Winner-take-all.
Posted on at May 21, 2007 06:14 PM