Tuesday, June 06, 2006

Phased Immigration Bill   [Mark Krikorian]

Hillary told the NY Daily News in April that she supports a phased approach, withholding amnesty until a year or two after enforcement measures take effect: "I would not support it if the legislation was just for border security and we had to come back to Congress for everything else. We need to structure it as one piece of comprehensive legislation, with a staged implementation." Krauthammer also backed the idea.

And Tom Tancredo introduced a bill last year (HR 3333) to do just this; Sec. 111 lists the conditions that would have to be met before the guestworker program outlined in the bill would be allowed to start.

But Mickey Kaus has pointed out the problem with such an approach: "Message: Sneak in now and you can become a U.S. citizen—but this offer ends soon! The fence is going up! Wouldn't that prompt an undocumented rush for the border that would make the settlement of Oklahoma look tame?"

So as appealing as the phased approach sounds, I have to agree with Harold Ford: "So I think you have to secure the borders first, and once you do that you can have a reasonable and serious conversation about what to do with 11 million illegal immigrants in this country now, and you can have a serious conversation about providing, or laying out, a path to citizenship."

In other words: Enforcement First, and we'll talk about the rest later. A phased approach is certainly an improvement over the Senate's Amnesty First bill, but it's still based on the premise that you can't have enforcement unless it's pre-packaged with legalization. What's the urgency on legalization? The illegals who are squeezed out by enforcement won't need to be legalized, and we'll eventually have to do something with those who are still here in any case.

06/06 01:55 PMShare