Senate Compormise on Immigration

The US Senate in its great anxiety to make it home for spring vacation as announced a compromise illegal immigration amnesty bill. Like most things that seep out of Congress this has a multilevel approach to obscuring their lack of resolve to solving this issue.

The compromise would give illegal immigrants who have been in the United States for more than five years a chance to legalize their status and, eventually, to become U.S. citizens if they pay a fine and meet a series of requirements. Other rules would apply to those who have been in the country less than five years but more than two years from the effective date of Jan. 7, 2004.

To their credit they did kill off the Kennedy-McCain bill which was bad enough, but in doing so they replaced it with something even worse. Kennedy-McCain at least handed out the goodies straight up, this compromise has some people getting the goods while others have to shuffle all over the country to get theirs.

How I wonder do they really think that people who have come here illegally and basically left alone are going to now pony up $2000, actually learn English and expose themselves to background checks. Why wouldn't they just do as they are doing now and pick up some bogus documents at their local forgery shop? If any of them do turn themselves in are they going to use the date on their fake Social Security card to prove how long they've been here? The most interesting bit of nonsense is the requirement that those here less that 5 years must go to a port of entry and apply for a visa. Right, they'll all just stuff themselves into a van and saunter on over to a port of entry where the citizens will be overjoyed to have mounds of people milling about waiting for Uncle Sam to get them all processed quickly and efficiently. Only a US Senator could justify this nonsense as a solution.

Fortunately for us it takes a long time for all this to be decided. Even if they pass this bill it has to go into the reconciliation committee to make one bill out of both the Senate and House versions. The two are so far apart that the Southwest of America may have been ceded back to Mexico before they put something out that the public will accept. You can bet my Senators and Representative will be hearing more on this from me.