and John Podhoretz take on it
These comprehensive legislative solutions - the sorts of bills that run hundreds of pages in length and are written in impenetrable gobbledygook - are almost always disastrous.
They are jerry-rigged, rickety affairs whose language is inexact and imprecise by design. They often do the opposite of what they are intended to do. The best (or worst) example is the big 1996 bill that was intended to slice away regulation from the telecom industry - and merely ended up handing out gifts to big companies.
Critics of the immigration bill have already gone through it with a fine-tooth comb and found dozens of instances in which tough-sounding provisions are revised and undercut pages later.
Here's a doozy, uncovered by talk-radio host Hugh Hewitt. While the bill starts off with language that suggests no goodies will flow to illegals until the border is strengthened by fencing and more patrol agents, other language - 260 pages later - seems to remove the trigger from the trigger mechanism.
That contradiction is surely intentional - the act of a clever liberal congressional staffer who was surreptitiously trying to remove a provision that was added to satisfy the complaints of conservative senators.
That's pernicious and disturbing - and par for the course with one of these comprehensive bills. It violates the central principle of representative government - which is not only that the people should govern themselves, but that the governing law written by their representatives should mean what it says.
You can't defend illegal immigration citing the need of more workers without addressing the damage done by minimum wage and welfare provisions that make too many people in this country un-productive. Let's put the low skilled labor to work in this country first, saving the tax payer's money, before we pretend that we have a labor shortage.
Much of this is really an attempt to skirt federal employment laws that are many times unproductive. Rather than cheat by hiring illegals, companies need to have the incentive to defeat unproductive labor laws in Washington. Hiring illegals is the path of least resistence that is no more than a stopgap that doesn't address the longterm problems of having a segment of citizens in this country not reaching their potential.
Every illegal hired somewhere is yet another citizen that is left on the dole for you and me to pay for.
1 comment:
I forget where I saw it, but I was reading something yesterday that made the point that the great unspoken in all this is that the real victims of unskilled Mexican immigration are unskilled black Americans.
Elsewhere someone noted that McCain, whose brilliant campaign finance reforms shifted the fundraising edge from Republicans to Democrats and the use of the funds from regulated to unregulated, now gives us this immigration bill which adds millions of Democrat voters. Genius!
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