What follows is a response to the President's address last night. The article appeared in the Chicago Tribune and does not appear to have been written by a liberal which is good to know if you're a conservative afraid of being infected.
O'Sullivan brings up points that i did not consider.
Did these ploys sneak into Bush's speech?
May 16, 2006
BY JOHN O'SULLIVAN
For my next trick, ladies and gentlemen, I will perform a death-defying stunt -- no, not climbing a 300-foot ladder, diving through seven rings of fire and landing perfectly safely in a glass of water. That's easy once you know how to do it.
Instead, I shall advise you on how to interpret President Bush's speech on immigration that you heard last night but that was delivered several hours after this column was written. Very simply: Ask yourselves the following questions:
Did the president use the phrase ''comprehensive immigration reform'' several times? That's revealing because this phrase is an example of smuggling. He hopes that by wrapping a ''temporary guest-worker program'' and the ''not an amnesty'' provision to legalize the 12 million illegals already here -- both of which are unpopular -- inside a tough-sounding popular promise to secure the border with the National Guard, he will persuade most Americans to accept the first two proposals.
Did the president spend a large part of his speech on promising to secure the border by sending the National Guard there? Heigh-ho. This is the umpteenth time that Bush has promised to toughen up border security with a new initiative. He does so whenever there is public disquiet about illegal immigration.
Yet this kind of mini-initiative is fundamentally irrelevant. As this column has repeatedly pointed out, porous borders are the result of uncontrolled immigration as much as its cause. You cannot control the borders, however many patrols you hire or fences you build, if you grant an effective pardon to anyone who gets 100 miles inland.
Besides, a guest-worker program that admits as many people as employers are willing to hire (at sweatshop wages Americans won't accept) makes extra border security pointless. If everyone can come in legally, there won't be any illegals crossing the desert or swimming the river.
Did the president deny that he and the Senate are proposing an amnesty because the 12 million illegals ''will have to go to the end of the line''?
The trick here is the identity of the line. You thought it meant the line to enter and live in the good old USA, didn't you? That's exactly what the president and his speechwriters wanted you to think. In fact, it means the line to become a citizen. Under the Senate-White House ''compromise,'' the illegals will immediately be granted the right to reside here permanently while legal applicants still wait outside.
It's the line to enter that really matters, however, since a U.S. permanent resident has all the rights and duties of a U.S. citizen except the right to vote and the duty to serve on a jury. Illegals will have to wait a dozen or so years inside America before they obtain those last two. And they will probably be casting votes when those ''ahead of them in the line'' are still sitting in consular waiting rooms in Warsaw and Manila. Still, all together now, ''IT'S NOT AN AMNESTY.''
When the president stressed that the guest-worker program would be temporary, did he mention ''anchor babies''? No? Well, just guessing, but that omission may be because ''anchor babies,'' as the phrase implies, make ''temporary'' guest-workers permanent.
Here's how: Under the U.S. Constitution, if a temporary guest-worker or spouse gives birth during their stay, they become parents of a U.S. citizen and enjoy a right of residence and, in due course, citizenship. The baby anchors them in the United States and nullifies the president's pledge that temporary guest-workers will have to return when their job assignment ends. Unless Bush proposed a constitutional amendment to remove that right of citizenship (and my guess is that he proposed no such change), then the guest-worker program is simply another route to permanent U.S. residency and citizenship.
Did the president quote many statistics about the number of people likely to be admitted under the ''compromise'' legislation? Or the likely cost of granting amnesty? No? Well, that's hardly surprising. When Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions produced a chart suggesting that something like 30 million people would be admitted under provisions of the compromise bill, his brave and effective speech halted it dead in its tracks in the Senate before Easter.
But the latest estimates suggest that Sessions was being overly cautious. Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation has just added up all the provisions of the bill -- for instance, it doubles the number of legal immigrants -- and discovered they would admit 103 million new people over the next 20 years. It's estimated that 19 million people would otherwise enter America over the same period.
The same author last week added up the fiscal costs of the Hagel-Martinez compromise bill. He concluded that the long-term cost of government benefits could be $30 billion per year or more: ''In the long run, the Hagel/Martinez bill, if enacted, would be the largest expansion of the welfare state in 35 years.'' It was very sensible of the president not to bore the listeners with such details.
Finally, did the president cite polls arguing that the American people were on the side of such generous reforms? If so, he's been reading the New York Times or Time magazine again. Both media outlets, which favor open borders, have been asking questions designed to push people into supporting amnesty and guest-worker programs. So the Center for Immigration Studies designed a scrupulously fair opinion poll that laid out all the real-world options in neutral language. It found that the ''enforcement only'' bill favored by House Republicans was preferred over the Senate ''compromise'' bill by roughly 2-1.
All in all, Mr. Bush seems bent on committing political suicide. Will the American people join him?
