Senate Immigration Bill Hits Snag
Byy William L. Watts

WASHINGTON (Dow Jones) — A proposed overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws that would give millions of illegal immigrants a path to citizenship hit a parliamentary snag in the Senate Thursday, endangering prospects for passage of a fragile bipartisan compromise that is a top legislative priority for the White House.

In a 33-to-63 vote, the Senate fell well short of the 60 needed to limit debate on the bill and set the stage for a vote on passage. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., had sought to wrap up work on the bill by the end of the week.

While that goal now appears elusive, Reid said that he wouldn’t yank the bill from the floor, but would allow further work on pending amendments in hope of reaching agreement on a final timetable.

“This is a marathon. We owe it to the American people to move forward on this legislation,” said Reid, who added that he planned to seek another debate-limiting vote later Thursday.

My view is that he owes it to the American people not to move forward on it. (Perhaps he owes it to the Mexican people to move forward on it–that’s different.) But what he really owes it to Americans of both parties is not to do it without debating it first

UPDATE: Another attempt at cloture fails, 45-50, see here for details.

Here’s another excerpt from my new American Conservative article (not online yet) on why elite thinking about immigration is so vapid:

• It is unfashionable to admit publicly the existence of group statistical differences. The endless campaign in American society against stereotypes has reached the point that simple acts of pattern recognition are in disrepute and demand reflexive debunking by citation of whatever contrary example is available. “Any exception disproves the tendency” appears to be the rule.
• The media’s dislike of reporting on averages is exacerbated by its love for man-bites-dog stories. The illegal immigrant who graduates from Cal Tech is news because it’s new: it doesn’t happen very often. In contrast, the consistently dismal performance of Latino students on average — by twelfth grade, immigrants are five to six grade levels behind Anglo whites, while even American-born Hispanics trail by three to four grade levels — isn’t news because it’s boring and depressing.

• Among the privileged, if a tree falls in the forest but it’s not reported in the New York Times, it never happened. For example, the best estimate is that the Latino crime rate is roughly triple the Anglo white rate, which would not come as much of a surprise to anybody who doesn’t live in a cave. Yet, because the major media won’t note differences in mean crime rates by ethnicity, this fact is considered outside the limits of acceptable discussion of immigration. …

• That the chief supporters of “comprehensive immigration reformer” — the White House, corporate America, Democratic Party chieftains, the Catholic Church, race racketeers (such as the National Council of La Raza), the educartel, and big media — represent more or less what a Sixties radical would have decried as The Establishment does not raise doubts in the minds of contemporary wordsmiths. God may not always be on the side of the big battalions, but public intellectuals are these days. …
• Open borders enthusiasm often reflects covert hostility toward African-Americans. Hispanic illegal immigrants are slowly pushing African Americans out of the most expensive cities, such as New York, which has been losing American-born blacks since 1979. And, let’s be frank, many affluent whites are happy to see African-Americans go. The Latino influx can create a temporary dip in the crime rate. Illegal immigrants generally arrive at too mature an age to get involved in youth street gangs — but their sons, who grow up feeling territorial about their means streets, flock to gangs. …

In his 6/6/07 Townhall.com column “Yes, Immigration Is About Culture,” Terence Jeffrey finished strong:

“Balkanization, fostered by the multiculturalist mindset, is a threat to American culture, but there is a greater threat behind the current drive to amnesty all illegal aliens and maintain a flow of new, exploitable, unskilled foreign laborers.

“This is the ideology that wants to write into law — in this nation founded on the principle that God created all men equal — that there shall be a resident subclass of laborers constrained by government to work for wages so low no American would accept them. This ideology is a form of materialism that puts the pursuit of profit above all else. It is the inordinate love of money.

“It would dissolve what is best about America in a culture of greed.”

Economist Bruce Bartlett is another Townhall columnist. Bartlett was precocious among prominent conservatives, as he stopped drinking the Bush Kool-Aid in 2004, saying “If George W. Bush wins, there will be a civil war in the Republican Party starting on Nov. 3.” In 2005, Bartlett was fired by his 12-year employer, the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis, over his criticism of Bush. Bartlett subsequently fleshed out his criticisms in the book Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy. (I haven’t read the book — I just know about it.)

In his own Townhall column of 6/6/07, “Immigration Frustration” Bartlett provided a perfect illustration of those concluding remarks by his Townhall colleague Jeffrey:

“Meanwhile, as miserable as their lives are, for most illegal aliens this is a good deal, too. They wouldn’t come here—braving a lot of hardship in the process—if they didn’t think they were coming out ahead on the deal. In short, the status quo is really a win-win for everyone.

“We don’t want to open the borders entirely, because that would let in a lot of riffraff. But we don’t want to close the borders entirely, either, because we need the cheap labor. So, in my opinion, the optimum is to allow some illegal immigration, but with enough enforcement to keep it under control.

“It is precisely because of their illegal status that they are valuable and are willing to work cheaply. If they become legal, as the pending legislation would establish, the next thing you know they will be demanding the minimum wage, health benefits, and unions, at which point they may no longer be a net benefit to our economy, but a liability.”

Savor that one for a minute! As Dave Barry would say, “I am not making this up.”

What it calls to my mind is a brief passage at the end of Chapter 10 in Max Shulman’s classic 1943 farce on college life, Barefoot Boy With Cheek:

“A capitalist banker walks past. He sees their bodies. He calls a policeman stooge. ‘These people owe me money,’ he says. ‘Take them to the tallow works and have them rendered. Turn over the proceeds to me.’ Then he turns and walks away. His footsteps echo hollowly in the distance.”

Perhaps the best way to look at Bartlett — clear-eyed on Bush relatively early on, but a modern-day Ebenezer Scrooge with respect to illegal aliens — is parallel to the advice by Eric Blair (aka “George Orwell”) on what to make of Salvador Dali:

“One ought to be able to hold in one’s head simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being.”

Orwell — who “hated cant and lying and cruelty in life and in literature” and thought “that modern man was inadequate to cope with the demands of his history” — would presumably have had a field day with someone as civilizationally and morally obtuse as Bartlett.

Roberto Rodriguez writes at Common Dreams and The Capital Times:

Consider the following: If the United States were to put up a 2,000-mile wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and if the 12 million nannies, busboys, gardeners and maids were deported, would the illegal and immoral war in Iraq immediately come to a halt?

If undocumented workers were deported, would gas prices go down, would it compel U.S. corporations to immediately institute a living wage for all workers, and would Congress pass universal health care overnight?
…..
The urge to blame illegal immigrants or anyone else for the nation’s problems is the result of the Bush administration’s politics of fear, hate and blame. They’ve unleashed that dynamic, and now Americans have come to believe that their rights, livelihood and happiness depend on the denigration and dehumanization of their fellow human beings.

My own comment:

As an American that has worked in occupations(farm worker, construction worker, software engineer) in which immigrants play a very important role, I tend to think that immigrants are used as a shield by wealthy and corporate interests in the US. Why should any amnesty apply to US citizens that profited from violating US immigration law?

There is much more operating here than simple xenophobia. For most Americans, their US citizenship is the most valuable asset they can ever hope to have. Allowing citizenship to be doled out as fits corporate interests degrades the value of citizenship and props up a predatory elite. Has the average American’s life really improved since the 1965 immigration expansion? What about the distribution of wealth and income?

The Kennedy/McCain/Bush proposal is not a solution to this problem.
We need to look beyond the currently popular proposals to a package of policies that might really improve the lives of people in both Mexico and the US.

When you look at other countries with high levels of immigration, most are quite undemocratic. There are also clear examples of highly egalitarian countries that have prospered without high levels of immigration.

Do immigration and massive US foreign borrowing keep the US from pursuing sane, realistic solutions to its problems? Clearly this unpopular, unnecessary war would be harder for the US government to fight if it had to pay a living wage at home-and couldn’t recruit soldiers lured by the attraction of a green-card.