Won't This Ever Go Away?

I wrote last week that immigration wasn't a front-burner issue for me. Myopic right-wing stupidity is, though, but I'm too hungry to spare the time to discuss that right now.

In the mean time, the gentleman and scholar Mark Levin summed up the currently existing Senate immigration bill well enough that I don't have to squander any excess skullsweat on articulating it in my own right:

The bill would make permanent so-called temporary guest-workers as they wouldn't have to return home (so much for going to the back of some imagined line); it would expand greatly the number of legal aliens invited to come to our country by tens of millions (apparently there's no end to the number of jobs Americans won't do); it would legalize virtually all of the eleven million illegal aliens currently in our country (the number is probably much greater); it would apply Davis-Bacon union wage requirements on jobs performed by so-called temporary workers (so much for cheap labor and cheap lettuce); it would confer Social Security benefits on immigrants for the period of time they were working using stolen or fake Social Security numbers (but it's not amnesty, they tell us); and it wouldn't recognize English as the nation's official language (so much for promised assimilation). And, of course, the same federal politicians and bureaucracy that won't and/or can't enforce the current law assure us that they'll manage and enforce a far more complicated, multi-tier, multi-level system involving far more people.

Meanwhile, we're supposed to accept all of this and more in exchange for what is essentially a sound-bite about using a few thousand National Guardsmen on the border—who are not going to be doing border enforcement. A 370-mile fence will supposedly be built, leaving about 85% of the southern border without a physical fence. But there will be sensors and gliders that will presumably get an accurate count of the number of illegal aliens crossing our border since there won't be enough physical barriers to stop them or border agents to apprehend them.

I don't understand what's driving this nonsense on the Republican side, so don't ask me. There's no conceivable policy benefit to the country. There's nothing in it for them politically unless they're all going to change their party registrations en masse, because the only party that will benefit from tens of millions of unassimilable freeloading foreigners overrunning America is the Democrats. It's a complete enigma. And yet they're so self-righteous about it!

Someone wrote last week (I forget who, and I'm not about to go cyberspelunking for the link) that it may be that George W. Bush is, by obstinately pushing a "comprehensive" border erasure agenda nobody outside the Beltway wants (no citizen, anyway), actively trying to drive the conservative movement out of the Republican Party. Even a month ago I would have ascribed such a sentiment to the tinfoil hat brigades. But now? It makes about as much sense as any other explanation.

Call it "Pappy's revenge."