McCain/Kennedy - Fool Me Twice, Shame on Me

Date: Friday, May 13, 2005 9:48 PM

JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER

by Rob Sanchez
May 13, 2005 No. 1259

Senators John McCain and Ted Kennedy are quite the "odd couple". To see
a picture of the two of them in action go to this webpage:
http://fullcoverage.yahoo.com/s/nm/20050512/pl_nm/congress_immigration_dc

I don't know who did this press release, but thanks!
http://www.phxnews.com/fullstory.php?article=21176

Mark Krikorian, executive director at the Center for Immigration
Studies, hasn't come out fighting like this in a long time. The article
below is as hard hitting as anything I have ever read from him.

The CIS website is at:
http://www.cis.org/

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http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/krikorian200505130942.asp

May 13, 2005, 9:42 a.m.
Fool Me Twice, Shame on Me
The McCain/Kennedy amnesty.

By Mark Krikorian

The McCain/Kennedy amnesty bill has been unveiled, and its the same
hoax weve fallen for before.

Like the telemarketer who bilks a widow and then comes back in a
different guise to charge a fee to "help" her get the original money
back, the anti-borders crowd created todays immigration crisis and
is now offering as a solution the very policies that got us in this
mess in the first place.

Ordinarily the introduction of one more bill wouldnt warrant much
attention on Capitol Hill. Each year, congressmen introduce thousands
of pieces of legislation, often merely to spark discussion on an issue
or placate a noisy constituency. Few ever make any progress.

But the McCain/Kennedy bill (called the Secure America and Orderly
Immigration Act) has a good deal of muscle behind it, and in any case
is the only amnesty-guestworker bill that will have a significant
coalition pushing it. Yesterdays press conference included not only
senators McCain and Kennedy, but also Brownback and Lieberman, plus
Republican representatives Flake and Kolbe from Arizona, and Illinois
Democrat Gutierrez. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce backed it, as did the
National Restaurant Association, the Service Employees International
Union, the American Immigration Lawyers Association, the National
Immigration Forum, as well as writer Tamar Jacoby.

The essence of the bill is the same as the 1986 Immigration Reform and
Control Act: amnesty up front for millions of illegal aliens in
exchange for paltry promises of future enforcement - promises that will
quickly be abandoned. But in 1986, many people didnt know that yet.
There was a sense then that the law was a grand bargain - closing the
back door by prohibiting the employment of illegal immigrants (for the
first time ever), but tying up the loose ends of prior policy missteps
with an amnesty.

But in the words of the old Russian saying, fool me once, shame on you;
fool me twice, shame on me.

The amnesty part works this way: The former illegal aliens are
re-labeled as legal workers; after a six-year period of indenture,
payment of some fines, criminal and security background checks, and an
English and civics test, they (and their families) get green cards.
This is similar to how the last amnesty worked, except for the term of
indenture; the 1986 law amnestied those who had already entered the
country before a certain date, some four years prior to the laws
passage. Thus the McCain/Kennedy proposal is a prospective amnesty, as
opposed to the 1986 measure, which was a retrospective amnesty.

The guestworker part of the bill provides for 400,000 new foreign
workers a year, with an escalator clause if businesses snap up the
cheap, docile labor faster than expected. These "temporary" workers
would have to serve only a four-year period of indenture before they,
too, would get green cards. To accommodate them, legal immigration
quotas would be increased by close to half a million a year.

The enforcement sections of the bill are laughably thin, making the
amnesty-in-exchange-for-enforcement claim even less plausible than it
would be otherwise. The part on border security is almost a parody of a
Washington cop-out: It orders up yet another "National Strategy for
Border Security" (how about picking one of the previous strategies and
just enforcing it?), plus an advisory committee, two coordination
plans, and various other reports and programs and multilateral
partnerships. Its like John Kerry going duck hunting: Hes wearing
the right outfit, but hes obviously insincere.

And the interior enforcement provisions seem intended to actually
hobble enforcement. Though the law provides for a system to verify
employment eligibility, it instructs the Social Security administration
to reinvent the wheel rather than simply expand on the successful pilot
system the immigration service has been developing for over a decade.
The job of auditing firms for compliance with the immigration law would
also be taken away from immigration agents, and given instead to the
Labor Department, perhaps the only agency even less capable of doing
its job. And the bill specifically says that it does not give state and
local cops any new authority to enforce immigration law.

Despite the long list of interest groups behind the legislation, the
McCain/Kennedy amnestys odds arent good. John Cornyn, chairman of
the Senates immigration subcommittee, doesnt like it, and the
Senate recently defeated a more narrow amnesty proposal from senators
Craig and Kennedy (funny how that name keeps popping up). On the House
side, theres a new pro-borders majority among Republicans, energized
by their victory with the Real ID Act, that will fight the amnesty
tooth and nail. And the White House is uttering sweet nothings,
standing back out of concern that supporting this bill, which is an
amnesty even by the presidents slippery definition, could cause a
"read my lips"-style blowup among conservatives.

Perhaps most important, the public is becoming increasingly concerned
about immigration. The issue is seldom among the top two or three
issues for voters, but that seems to be changing. Recurrent reports of
terrorists and super-violent gang members exploiting our broken
immigration system are finally getting peoples attention. The way
the Minuteman Project border-watch program in Arizona resonated on talk
radio, its spread to other states, and its adoption by prominent
politicians like California Gov. Schwarzenegger are all signs that the
McCain/Kennedy amnesty bill may well be the last gasp of the
anti-borders crowd.

Center for Immigration Studies.

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