The hard-working Senator from Alabama has posted a list of 20 things wrong with the wretched Senate amnesty bill. As he remarked…

“I am deeply concerned about the numerous loopholes we have found in this legislation. They are more than technical errors, but rather symptoms of a fundamentally flawed piece of legislation that stands no chance of actually fixing our broken immigration system… Many of the loopholes are indicative of a desire not to have the system work.”

Here are a few of the more egregious loopholes, but they are all terrible. Read the whole thing, if you can stand it.

Loophole 5 - Completion of Background Checks Not Required For Probationary Legal Status:
Legal status must be granted to illegal aliens 24 hours after they file an application, even if the aliens have not yet “passed all appropriate background checks.” (Last year’s bill gave DHS 90 days to check an alien’s background before any status was granted). No legal status should be given to any illegal alien until all appropriate background checks are complete. [See pp. 290].

Loophole 6 - Some Child Molesters Are Still Eligible:
Some aggravated felons — those who have sexually abused a minor — are eligible for amnesty. A child molester who committed the crime before the bill is enacted is not barred from getting amnesty if their conviction document omitted the age of the victim. The bill corrects this loophole for future child molesters, but does not close the loophole for current or past convictions. [See p. 47: 30-33, & p. 48: 1-2]

Loophole 7 - Terrorism Connections Allowed, Good Moral Character Not Required:
Illegal aliens with terrorism connections are not barred from getting amnesty. An illegal alien seeking most immigration benefits must show “good moral character.” Last year’s bill specifically barred aliens with terrorism connections from having “good moral character” and being eligible for amnesty. This year’s bill does neither. Additionally, bill drafters ignored the Administration’s request that changes be made to the asylum, cancellation of removal, and withholding of removal statutes in order to prevent aliens with terrorist connections from receiving relief. [Compare § 204 in S. 2611 from the 109th Congress with missing § 204 on p. 48 of S.A. 1150, & see missing subsection (5) on p. 287 of S.A. 1150].

Loophole 8 - Gang Members Are Eligible:
Instead of ensuring that members of violent gangs such as MS 13 are deported after coming out of the shadows to apply for amnesty, the bill will allow violent gang members to get amnesty as long as they “renounce” their gang membership on their application. [See p. 289: 34-36].
[Sen. Sessions Releases List of 20 Loopholes in the Senate Immigration Bill, Sen. Jeff Sessions Press Release 6/4/07]

This list should not be construed to mean that there are ONLY 20 loopholes in the Senate amnesty bill.

We at VDARE.COM have hammered all of them…the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Denver Post and many others. But here’s an unbelievable story that tells you all you need to know about where print journalism is headed.

A friend at the Los Angeles Times told me that, apparently in an effort to save itself from extinction, management asked the staff to promote new subscriptions and newsstand sales at every opportunity.

So my friend approached her niece, a young professional woman and a recent graduate from a prestigious California university, and asked her to consider buying the Times.

She replied, “Sure, where can I get one?”

A college graduate who had never bought a dead-tree newspaper! Really and truly, this is the stuff that cannot be made up.

From the Indian Times:

Hewlett-Packard has named Prith Banerjee as director of its storied HP Labs research unit, replacing Dick Lampman, who is retiring.

Banerjee, 46, who is presently dean of the college of engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago, will join HP as senior vice-president, research, and director of HP Labs, effective August 1. Banerjee will report to Shane Robison, who is chief strategy and technology officer for Palo Alto, California-based HP, long considered Silicon Valley’s first startup.

Banerjee is nominally a US citizen, but in his words:

I visit India regularly, and have gone to India almost every December for the past 23 years. I love India, and I love Kolkata. I became an U.S. citizen only recently for professional reasons, but in my heart, I am still very much an Indian.

Now, it is really a good idea to have people who obtain citizenship for “professional reasons” managing the educational opportunities available to US born youth? Is there a potential conflict of interest here?

Are the educational trends we’ve seen in recent years benefiting the US or other nations?

What are the security implications of having folks with clear loyalties to other countries assuming these kinds of positions of responsibility?

Is HP hiring really meritocratic or focused on maximizing shareholder value or are there other forces in play?

Nancy Zuckerbrod writes at Associated Press

At 23, Mariana should be carefree. She is finishing up her undergraduate degree at the University of California, Los Angeles, and has been accepted to a master’s program at Harvard University’s education school.

But life is not so simple for Mariana, who insisted that only her first name be published because she is illegally in the United States and worries she could be deported to Guatemala, where she was born.

I think it is an odd coincidence that this lady is heading to Harvard, an institution that claims to have an honor code-but still gave a degree to Teddy Kennedy despite his idiotic cheating attempt.

I wonder what US education would look like without illegal students, H-1b visas or for that matter, any significant number of student visas. Would the education of Americans be better served? Would US educational institutions better cater to the needs of Americans? What would the job opportunities for young Americans be like? How would the social life on US campuses change? Might US students see professions that require education as more attractive relative to trades?

I can empathize with the situation of folks that invest in a US education thinking that dishonorable losers like Kennedy, McCain and Bush really can deliver. I think the wealthy backers of those folks should be held accountable for providing significant resettlement allowances to help these folks adjust any necessary changes in US laws. If folks like Mariana need further education because their immigration status precludes them from working or staying in the US, the wealth accumulated by use of illegal immigrant labor can be used to help them suitably enhance and apply their talents in their homelands.

The price tag on really solving this immigration mess is going to be high-very high. Unfortunately, it gets higher the longer we wait.

The about-to-be-renewed storm over S.1348, the Comprehensive Capitulation-to-Mexico Act of 2007, has stimulated a weeks-long burst of excellent analyses. Here I simply want to point VDARE readers to several that, so far as I know, haven’t previously been linked here. There’s a lot in these articles that we can use for making the patriotic case to those public officials whose brains are capable of grasping ideas more complicated than the “We’re a nation of immigrants!” third-grade-level “argument.”

Ann Coulter seems to have decisively sworn off the Bush Kool-Aid in her recent “A Green Card in Every Pot.” This is a brief piece that deals with big, non-politically-correct ideas. I’ll treat you to three of her first four paragraphs …

“Americans (…) believe the natural state of the world is to have individual self-determination, human rights, the rule of law and a robust democratic economy. On this view, most of the existing world and almost all of world history is a freakish aberration.

“In fact, the natural state of the world is Darfur. The freakish aberration is America and the rest of the Anglo-Saxon world.

[snip]

“At the precise moment in history when the U.S. has abandoned any attempt to transmit Anglo-Saxon virtues to its own citizens, much less to immigrants, George Bush wants to grant citizenship to hordes of immigrants who are here precisely because they are fleeing cultures that are utterly dysfunctional and ruinous for the humans who live in them.”

… and urge you to read the rest! (In Coulter’s very first sentence above, I’ve omitted eight words that are excellent but that might distract from the larger idea in the passage.)

Columnist Jim Pinkerton, in “Poor immigrants end up being expensive,” (Newsday, 5/29/07) says, “Bush bids to be remembered, not as the president who brought democratization to Iraq but rather as the president who brought Brazilification to the United States.” I’ve heard others predict the same American destiny if immigration anarchy continues — a small plutocracy and a large peasantry, with essentially no middle class — and make the analogy to Brazil, but the word “Brazilification” strikes me as a useful invention.

John Fonte, a senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, wrote a brief overview of S.1348, “Comprehensively Bad.” He includes nine bulleted paragraphs on various aspects of S.1348’s awfulness and then a bit more discussion about his own specialty, patriotic assimilation. Here’s a sample paragraph on that topic:

“Title VII: Section 707 spells out the details. The term ‘assimilation’ disappears; the concept of ‘Americanization’ never appears; and the Euro-speak weasel word ‘integration’ enters the text. Thus, 100 million federal dollars will be given to states and cities to award grants to ‘nonprofit organizations with experience working with immigrant communities’ for ‘effective integration of immigrants into American society.’”

(Note that one of Fonte’s bulleted points, “Tax amnesty,” has been superseded, at least for now, by an amendment [SA 1190, passed by voice vote on 5/24] John McCain got tacked onto S.1348.)

The Hoover Institution’s Stanley Kurtz has been paying significant attention to the family-unification chicanery in S.1348. In his latest, “Look to Europe,” he draws attention to Europe’s experience with the poisonous brew of multiculturalism/anti-assimilation and cousin marriage among Muslims. Here’s an astonishing paragraph from near the end of this fairly long piece:

“The [New York] Times says it found ‘no evidence of wrongdoing’ by the families it interviewed, but the lure of family reunification is famous for provoking ‘wrongdoing.’ Here’s the remarkable story of an Iraqi refugee who married his mother in an attempt to use marriage-unification laws to bring his family to Norway. An extreme case, to be sure, but also an indication of the ingenuity that goes into exploiting family unification.”

That’s a teaser: Go to the Kurtz article and click on the link he provides at “Here’s” in the paragraph I quoted to be properly outraged by this life-imitates-Oedipus story.

In “No Alien Left Behind,” Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies concludes,

“Once an illegal alien gets legal status, no matter how ‘temporary,’ he’s here for good. Sponsors of the Senate’s amnesty bill know this full well.”

It’s a brief article and worth reading for the ammunition (bitter experience) it provides.

I mentioned “Rx for Breakdown,” an article by Kris Kobach, law professor and former counsel to former Attorney General John Ashcroft, in a blog entry a few days ago, but it seems worthwhile to point it out again. It’s a terrific summing up of the bureaucratic meltdown at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services [UCSIS] that will result if S.1348’s amnesty is enacted. A quote:

“It’s a bureaucratic sweatshop. Adjudicators told the GAO [Government Accountability Office] that their managers were consumed with meeting ‘production goals,’ driving the workers to process applications too quickly and increasing the risk of undetected fraud. Cash rewards are even given to the adjudicators who can work the fastest.

“As a result, USCIS doesn’t even bother to do commonsense verification with outside agencies - for example, calling a state Department of Motor Vehicles to see if two people claiming to be married actually live at the same address. Such scrutiny would take too much time. Many managers actually discourage caseworkers from seeking more info from aliens who submit suspicious applications.

“If they won’t call an American DMV, how can we expect the agency to contact local officials in Colombia to check for a criminal record?”

Jim Boulet, executive director of English First, wrote “Hillary’s Immigration Dilemma,” a couple of weeks ago. Despite the Hillary-focus in his title, Jim’s real theme was the destructive aspects of S.1348’s little-discussed language features. A sample:

“The 12 million or more illegal aliens who are to be given the immediate gift of amnesty thanks to the new Z visa would be expected, sometime during the next four years, merely to ‘demonstrate an attempt to gain an understanding of the English language.’

“This ‘attempt’ requires either taking the federal naturalization test, a test that a Washington Post editorial recently commended for its national pass rate of 84 percent, or enrolling in an English class, or simply being on a waiting list for an English class.

“The waiting-list exception will really annoy the electorate, considering how easy it is to get into an English class: church-sponsored English classes are free and gladly take all comers, while enrolling in a Berlitz or community college English class would cost only a small portion of the $20 billion remitted to Mexico in 2006.

“The Senate amnesty bill does ask that, after eight long years in the Z-visa program, illegal immigrants pass the naturalization test — after no more than three tries. If too many people should fail, there is always the 1996 Citizenship USA solution of dumbing down the test. Or allowing people take it in Spanish, thanks to E.O. 13166.”

As a scarred veteran of the immigration wars, I wasn’t at all surprised this morning to see, just as Congress returns from recess, a propaganda piece in the Washington Post, with the Amnesty/ Immigration Surge bill’s backers claiming that angry calls were falling off, touting another perverted poll etc. etc. [Backers of Immigration Bill More Optimistic, by Jonathan Weisman, June 4 2007.]

YAWN! The MSM’s long-time willingness to serve as the Treason Lobby’s echo-chamber has been not the least disgraceful feature of this shameful debate.

As I said this time last year, it can never be ruled out that bullying and bribery might get this thing through (in which case patriots will simply regroup and eventually roll it back). But, judging from the intensity of our emails - and the unprecedented stampede of Establishment Conservative rats off the sinking ship - it won’t be because America approves. Indeed, a less-publicized poll this morning should be of more interest to Republican legislators - Poll: Bush Base Erodes on Immigration Debate, by Gary Langer, ABC News, June 4. 2007.

I call this sort of whistling past the ugly fact of overwhelming American resistence to immigration “Kudlowing” - after Larry Kudlow, the CNBC talking head and notorious immigration enthusiast. I well remember Kudlow sitting across the table at one of the lunches that are a feature of life at National Review, assuring us that polls showed that Proposition 187 was going to lose in California and John O’Sullivan and I were making a mistake in positioning the magazine in favor of it.

He was wrong, needless to say. Proposition 187 won overwhelmingly. It’s always the same when Americans actually get the chance to vote.

Of course, our reward for being right was was that Buckley purged us and stopped the magazine from covering immigration for several critical years. (Rich Lowry was probably at the lunch too, but I don’t remember anything he said - in fact I don’t remember anything Lowry has ever said or written, an important political skill and probably why Bill Buckley made him editor.) Kudlow still gets to Kudlow away, both at NR and at CNBC.

He’s still wrong, though. He and his friends may succeed in abolishing America. But not because it wants to be.

Tell him.

Shows my age, I suppose, but the situation amongst the Establishment “Conservative” Commentary community as the Bush Amnesty/Immigration Surge Act gets closer is becoming becoming reminiscent of watching the fall of Saigon. There goes Charles Krauthammer (or Yankhammer), clinging to a helicopter’s skids. Here are NRO’s Frum and Goldberg, scrambling for cover. For VDARE.com, used to being lonely and ignored, the situation is odd. We are still ignored of course, but the most astonishing people have crowded into our space and are occupying our intellectual furniture.

It is not too early to ask, how did the Bush disaster occur? Peter Brimelow advanced his views last November. And ParaPundit is thinking about it too, with a kind reference to us:

2007 June 03 Sunday Conservative Commentators Failed To See Bush Clearly

Thanks, Para Pundit. (We’re investigating which VDARE.com writers ever liked Bush.)