The American Spectator

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The Nation's Pulse

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THE LATE BUT NOT LAMENTED Senate bill was in many ways a politician's dream. That is it was a complex proposal that would have given the impression a problem was being addressed when in fact nothing would have been done at all. The bill would have set up a Rube Goldberg system of dealing with the (use your preferred number) million illegal immigrants already in the country. Most by paying a small fine and some back taxes could just stay. But the bill did not provide for the bureaucratic infrastructure necessary to find, keep track of, and collect fines and taxes from the millions of new American residents it would have created. The immigration system is already drowning trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to keep up with people here on tourist and student visas and the people applying to enter the country legally as residents.

An almost comical aspect of the bill was that it stratified the way illegals would have been treated based on how long they have been in the country. The bill's authors must be under the mistaken impression that illegals have their hands date-stamped when they sneak across the border.

Illegal immigration is a serious problem that Americans want a serious answer to. Borders are an absolute requirement of sovereignty. They're not a hate crime. The government of the United States needs to decide who enters the country and under what circumstances, not employers who want cheap labor or cheeky demonstrators from other countries who seem the think the U.S. Constitution confers rights on them and that American citizens have obligations toward them. (We have enough people with an exaggerated sense of entitlement born here, thank you very much. We don't need to import more -- or just allow more to come here when the mood strikes them.)

It will be more difficult now with Democrats ascendant in Congress, as they have no more stomach for dealing with the immigration problem than do Republicans. But if Republicans want to ever be the majority party again they'll have to get serious about this one. If they continue with the opera buffa approach they've used in the past, it will be Martinez and the Republicans who are the turkeys.

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Taxes, Movies, Constitution, NATO, Immigration