Thank you, oh Nakedly Villanous One, for the Linky-type Love.

On all of these points we are in agreement. I too am perfectly willing to entertain, and am even inclined to be sympathetic to, the idea that our restrictions on LEGAL immigrants are currently too restrictive. But so long as we are unable to enforce them, their level of restricitiveness or permissiveness is at best a moot point, and at worst completely irrelevant.

Furthermore, the proponents of amnesty en masse fail to satisfactorily convince me that the same huge influx of illegals won’t start up the day after the amnesty, nor have they assured me that the end result won’t be another wave of amnesty X days/weeks/years/months down the road.

I don’t know about that, Brian. I have a 2-hour commute (that I only do once a week, thank goodness), and during the drive this morning, I was listening to a radio host that has approximately the same perspective as both you and our illustrious Maximum Leader. I was thinking, though– most American have never had to deal with INS, or whatever they’re called this week, and so don’t know the complete insanity of the bureaucracy. If legal immigration were easier, maybe there wouldn’t be such a problem with illegal immigration?

For example, let’s say you’re here legally, with a work visa, working on getting your green card. Your current employer sponsors you for the green card, but before the insanely long period required for INS to get around to processing your application, you lose your job. Not to worry, you get another one! Only now you have to start the entire green card process all over again.. what fun! (Note: There were talks about fixing this a while back, so if it’s not accurate, and I think it is, it’s at least illustrative).

I do agree, though, that any immigration reform bill must include meaningful enforcement provisions. The same talk show host I mentioned above also cited a report that the Federal government, in 2005, cited a total of ONE (1) company for immigration violations. I’m personally not convinced that we even need better border security (re: immigration; obviously we need it for simple security reasons) if we start cracking down on employers.

I won’t disagree with you that we should loosen up and let in more LEGAL immigrants. But that has nothing to do with what we should do about ILLEGAL immigrants.

For starters, if you really believe that that is the root cause of the huge tide of illegal immigrants, you’re mistaken. Most of the people who are here illegally are working in low end jobs with employers who don’t even bother asking for a green card.

Furthermore, your argument dodges the point Mike and I make, which is that if we fail to keep out illegal immigrants, and to uphold immigration laws, it doesn’t matter how strict or loose those laws are — everyones’ going to ignore them.

Securing the borders and enforcing the laws will force us to address them. If they truly are too restrictive, then we will feel the pinch pretty quickly once that happens, and can adjust accordingly. But if we are going to contiue to fail to enforce what’s in place, we might as well just abolish all immigration laws, throw open the borders, and let anyone who damn well pleases in.

That’s pretty much what we’re doing now.

Ack, sorry for the double-post; my proxy has been misbehaving.

It isn’t your proxy that is double posting, it is a little glitch here that I haven’t quite figured out yet.