Gail Russell Chaddock writes at the Christian Science Monitor:

President Bush’s proposal calls for immigrants to return to their home countries and pay $10,000 to obtain a three-year work visa to reenter the US legally.

$10,000 may sound like a lot of money, but the current market value of those Visas-and their cost to US taxpapers-is closer to $100,000.

There are 10 million applicants for US visas each year. Now, those numbers include substantial backlog–but Bush’s plan would increase that level of overall immigration enormously. If they want to sell visas, the basic rules of financial responsibility would dictate that there at least be an auction to set the price. Selling America down the river is sickening-but doing so at fire sale prices is downright insulting.

David Stout writes at the New York Times:

President Bush traveled to an Arizona town on the Mexican border today to try to build new momentum for an immigration bill

Later in the article:

The Senate passed a bill last year that would put most of the country’s illegal aliens on a path to citizenship, but the idea stalled in the House, where there was more opposition from conservatives. Prospects for a bill emerging from the full Congress seem even less favorable now, as Democrats and Republicans alike have taken note of anti-immigration sentiment among their constituents.

Moreover, politicians who are running, or thinking of running, for president in 2008 have encountered deep resentment toward illegal immigrants in Iowa, where meatpacking plants rely heavily on immigrant workers. Iowa’s early caucus contests are regarded as crucial to any candidate’s chances.

Now, when the administration is embroiled in an unpopular and unnecessary war, dealing with major scandals and security fiascos I don’t see why pushing an unpopular immigration policy is on Bush’s agenda.

The best reasonable explaination I can think of is someone in Latin America has some really good dirt on W.

The New York Times produces a story about federally commissioned studies into voter fraud and manages not to mention the most egregious voting fraud in America: aliens, illegal and otherwise, voting in American elections. [Panel Said to Alter Finding on Voter Fraud By Ian Urbina April 11, 2007] The Timesman could have asked “B-1 Bob” Dornan how he lost his once-safe Orange County, California seat to an agent-of-influence of Mexico, Loretta Sanchez. However, at the Times one does not ask questions when one knows one will not like the answer.

The Times is more interested in how two researchers, with the All-American names of Job Serebrov and Tova Wang, purported to find less evidence of voter fraud than the Bush Administration was expecting. The conclusion, bolstered by quotes from Democrats with names like Serrano and Martinez, is presumably that in Post-America no hay ningún problema in the elections department.

What really caught my eye, though, was this:

In a speech last April, Karl Rove, Mr. Bush’s senior political adviser, told a group of Republican lawyers that election integrity issues were an “enormous and growing” problem.

“We’re, in some parts of the country, I’m afraid to say, beginning to look like we have elections like those run in countries where the guys in charge are colonels in mirrored sunglasses,” Mr. Rove said. “I mean, it’s a real problem.” [Emphasis added]

If that is what Rove, who is half of Bush’s brain (isn’t Condo-icantspellit Rice the other?), really thinks, then why on earth are he and the man he advises so Hell-bent on importing the populations of just those kinds of countries? Especially when Rove’s statement – assuming it isn’t just a smart-ass wisecrack - makes it crystal-clear that he knows what repopulating America with the Third World – especially Latin Americans, Middle Easterners, Southeast Asians and, increasingly, black Africans – is already doing to the American polity.

This amnesty and “guest”-worker mongering isn’t just negligence or typical wishful liberal thinking. Karl Rove knows what his boss’s pet project will do to America, yet he continues to push for it. Traitor is the only word that fits. As it is for the un-Prodigal Son in the Oval Office – only more so.