According to Scott Johnson of Powerline, our old friend Tamar Jacoby has been having a hard time:

One of the highlights of the Claremont Institute summer policy conference this past weekend was the debate on immigration policy between Manhattan Institute fellow Tamar Jacoby and Claremont Institute fellow Professor Edward Erler. Jacoby endorses some version of a guest worker program such as President Bush threatens to propose in order to resolve our current immigration crisis. Professor Erler volubly dissented. Jacoby stomped off after the debate, refusing to shake Erler’s hand; I thought she’d more or less had her head handed to her.Power Line: Bordering on an argument

While we sympathize, we can tell her from experience that she would have much better luck in debates over the immigration crisis if she were arguing the other side.

We’ve recently seen the narrow passage of the CAFTA Job Destruction and Guest Worker Facilitation Act.

Tancredo warned there were significant immigration ramifications to this bill. What is interesting is that this bill like the Singapore Chile Free Trade act had significant provisions for facilitating expansion of immigration.

In both cases, had the members of the Immigration Reform Caucus opposed these bills, neither one could have passed.

Most members of the Immigration Reform Caucus appear to have voted for CAFTA–the exceptions are noted below.

Perhaps the immigration reform caucus should change its name to “Immigration Reform unless major donors want otherwise” Caucus? There is something really, really sick in the US political system when it consistently delivers policies the American people don’t want. Fixes might include :

1) Serious campaign finance reform-public funding of all national elections-with funds disbursed by a pool of selected by random from voters.

2) Proportional Representation(preferably a system like Single Transferrable Vote that takes power out of the hands of party bosses).

Unfortunately, at the moment, voters have the choice between facilitating illegal immigration by voting for Democrats or facilitating massive expansion of Guest Worker Visas by voting for Republicans.

The basic problem is that conservative based immigration reform simply can’t oppose the interest of the wealthy. Ultimately, immigration reform is a form of containment of concentration of wealth in the US. To solve this problem, we’ll either need to destroy one of the major political parties along the lines feared by James Carville ,completely rebuild one of the major political parties-or wait until the system collapses completely.

Immigration Reform Caucus Votes on CAFTA
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Ron Paul is extraordinary in Congress for his resolute libertarianism. He has always seemed to me to be genuinely anguished about immigration, and his call yesterday on lewrockwell.com for a crackdown on illegal immigration was a significant step. I’m particularly intrigued by this: “All federal government business should be conducted in English.” Paul here recognizes that government has a role in reinforcing the cultural community, very Tory of him! Of course, no attempt to combat illegal immigration by cutting off welfare can work without dealing with the citizen child problem and with the immense transfer represented by illegals’ children getting free public education.