Pre-Addendum: A cheery hello to visitors from JustOneMinute. Like Mr. Maguire, I cannot figure out how much a Z Visa will cost, but my instinct is that whatever price the immigration bureaucracy decides upon will be higher than the market will bear. In other words, the shadows will remain pretty dark.
In the middle of the world-wide war against terrorism, Congress has one good and palpable reason to concern itself with immigration reform: Illegal immigrants have fashioned a demi-monde, vast and ill-lit, within which our enemies can move with little fear of detection. While the plot to attack Fort Dix looks farcical, because a lucky accident averted it, it offers a glimpse of what is going on in the untended cellars of our society. Probability and common sense suggest that the Duka brothers are not the only mufsidun lurking in those shadows.
As I have argued before, national security demands that the several million people living in this country illegally be brought into the open and that the economic base of the immigrant smuggling, document forgery and allied industries be undermined. Otherwise, terrorists can use for nefarious ends the structure developed for slipping workers across our border and maintaining them outside the bounds of the law.
So far as I can see, the immigration compromise, whatever its merits might be in peacetime, doesn’t meet the essential wartime necessity. Restrictionists may declare that the prerequisites for the new “Z Visa”, which will give previously illegal residents the right to remain here indefinitely, are full of loopholes. Nonetheless, they are onerous enough to raise doubts that more than a small fraction of those eligible will comply with them for the sake of securing legal status. Hence, there will still be plenty of customers for makers of phony documentation and providers of gray market financial and employment services, and the number of illegals will remain too large to make enforcement of the immigration laws practicable.
The guest worker (“Y Visa”) program does even less to let in light. As the Wall Street Journal points out, it “would shift immigration away from family ties and toward a merit-based model that favors better-educated immigrants with higher skills”. At first blush, that is an excellent idea – except that it won’t cut into the business of the alien smuggling rings, which cater to workers with limited skills. And as long as those rings flourish, the mufsidun can use them, too.
Since the proposal will do little to hinder terrorists, I don’t see how it can be regarded as urgent Congressional business. We’ve stumbled along for 20 years since the last “comprehensive reform”, the Simpson-Mazzoli Act of 1986, which was full of good intentions and unintended consequences. Rushing to enact a thousand page bill based on a deal hastily hammered out a week ago is scarcely a formula for improving the situation. How much real thought underlies the key features of the measure? To begin with an elementary point, does more than guesswork support the view that the Y and Z Visas would be attractive to their putative beneficiaries? And, as Mark Steyn puts it, is “the agency that takes the best part of a decade to process nanny applications and which sent Mohammed Atta his visa six months after he’d died” going to be able to administer radically revised, more demanding programs?
All in all, Kyl-Kennedy is too trivial for the passion that it has aroused. It’s appalling to hear normally rational right-of-center bloggers and commentators explode like Krazy Kos Kids as they heap venom on minions of the Bush Administration. (This phenomenon, too, we have seen in the past.) The only step left to reach exactly the Kos level would be to blame a Jewish neocon conspiracy. It is almost as if the leaders of the conservative movement wanted to demoralize the rank-and-file and demonize the White House. David Frum, to take someone who ordinarily stands out as a pillar of good sense, devotes a long post to arguing, in essence, that the President is a closet leftist who loathes his supporters – as if nothing in his record mattered except immigration. The War on Terror, Supreme Court appointments, tax cuts: Those are nothing in the balance.
If the Paranoid Left comes to power in next year’s elections and proceeds to disarm the West in the face of Islamofascism, a large part of the fault will lie with those molders of conservative opinion who have no evident sense of what is most important in a perilous time. We can live with a flawed immigration policy. We have lived with one for about 80 years. We will not be able to live – literally – with an insouciant attitude toward the enemies of civilization.
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