A Comprehensive Immigration Poem

Here's a poem my Uncle relayed to me today.

~ ~ ~

I cross river, poor and broke,
Take bus, see employment folk.

Nice man treat me good in there,
Say I need go see Welfare.

Welfare say, "You come no more,
We send cash right to your door."

Welfare checks, they make you wealthy,
Medicaid it keep you healthy!

By and by, got plenty money,
Thanks to you, TAXPAYER dummy.

Write to friends in motherland,
Tell them 'come, fast as you can'

They come in turbans and Ford trucks,
I buy big house with welfare bucks.

They come here, we live together,
More welfare checks, it gets better!

Fourteen families, they moving in,
But neighbor's patience wearing thin.

Finally, white guy moves away,
I buy his house, and then I say,

"Find more aliens for house to rent."
In my yard I put a tent.

Send for family they just trash,
But they, too, draw welfare cash!

Everything is very good,
soon we own whole neighborhood.

We have hobby it called breeding,
Welfare pay for baby feeding.

Kids need dentist? Wife need pills?
We get free! We got no bills!

TAXPAYER crazy! He pay all year,
to keep welfare running here.

We think America darn good place!
Too darn good for white man race.

If they no like us, they can scram,
got lots of room in Pakistan.

~ ~ ~

Does that accurately reflect every illegal alien? Of course not. But it does fairly describe a lot of them. Enough that the idea of a second amnesty in twenty years that will just draw more of them across the border is economically, demographically, and legally foolhardy to nearly everybody outside the Beltway as it is a no-brainer to nearly everybody inside of it.

Hugh Hewitt is aware of it, but has tried to straddle this cavernous divide anyway. He believes that a comprehensive immigration bill is palatable if the ostensible national security and border enforcement provisions are (depending on the extremity of your point of view) made credible or added to the bill at all. So I gather from his take-down of Mickey Kaus' comments on the subject:

[KAUS:] If all these enforcement measures are so wonderful, why not enact just them and drop the questionable legalization part? Bush is holding the parts of the bill everyone says they want hostage to the parts he wants.

[HH:] Because that bill won't pass, and we need a bill because the border isn't secured and the visa program is still broken.

[KAUS:] If we tried the enforcement parts first, then we wouldn't have to trust the federal government. We could make sure the measures work before we go ahead with legalization (and attract a new wave of legalization-seeking illegals).

[HH:] The bill still won't pass, and if we don't get security out of the current Congress, an even worse bill could emerge under President Hillary.

Check the comments at the bottom of Hugh's post. He's taking a beating for the perception that he is moving toward the amnesty/border erasure crowd. Which is probably not fair since he's been clear from the start of this latest sordid episode that he thought the bill needed major "surgery" rather than to be taken outside and shot twice in the back of the head.

However, it's also fair to observe that now that it's been beaten back for the moment, the politically savvy side of Double-H has stepped back and the "good government" side - the same side that argued for the Harriet Miers Supreme Court nomination - has moved to the foreground. And his critique of Kaus does sound uncomfortably similar to the RINO rationalizations for supporting McCain-Kennedy - that we have to accept a crap bill now because Hillary will douse us in diarrhea if we wait.

It's not a terribly persuasive argument to the base, if the commenters are any indication. It also will matter little next year; the Republicans have critically wounded themselves again even without this bill's passage, like they did two years ago with the McCain mutiny on banning judicial confirmations filibusters. Whether we run Donk Lite or Reagan Resurrected, the GOP will simply have no chance at any level in 2008, the only question being the magnitude of the party's inevitable defeat. If the Dems, with the White House, a filibuster-proof Senate majority and a hundred-seat House majority, proceed to take an enacted McCain-Kennedy, strip out any pretense of enforcement and national security safeguards, jam it down our throats and rub our noses in it for good measure, it'll be produce a GOP comeback in 2010 just like the new president's health care putsch did in 1994.

Unless, of course, what 'Pubbies that remain collaborate in that amnesty as well. Which reminds me of the adage about killing the patient in order to kill the disease that's killing him.

It may not matter, since Hugh is convinced from his interview with Senator Jeff Sessions this afternoon that the bill is "beyond repair." This makes it a good time to remind Dr. Hewitt of the political hypocratic oath: "First, do no harm." Particularly when doing "something" is certain to make a bad situation worse, in pretty much every way.

UPDATE 6/12: Hugh tries the reasonable, conciliatory approach again today, and again to no avail. He appears unable or unwilling to grasp that this issue is beyond reasonable compromise; indeed, it is beyond reason at all. The Right simply does not want ANY bill because it has ZERO trust in the current Beltway crowd, regardless of party. Uncle Teddy could have his lapdogs Sailor and John Kyl write it to Double-H's exact specifications, and it wouldn't make any difference. I believe the expression is, "Once bitten, twice shy."

Virginia Patriot's comment sums it up:

If Bush had secured the border on September 12, 2001 and actually enforced employer sanctions vigorously and consistently since then, we'd be talking about a much smaller problem and many more would be willing to listen to some kind of compromise. It is the complete lack of enforcement that has doubled this problem in the last six years that exposes the deceitful attempt at forcing us into another amnesty by flooding the country with illegal aliens. The cynical way we are told we will not get border security or enforcement until we give them amnesty and a guestworker program is sickening. We won't be fooled again. We remember 1986. No amnesty/regularization/guestworker until we see ACTUAL fences and ACTUAL enforcement. Let's try that for twenty years after twenty years of inaction and then we can talk about reform.

UPDATE II: Looks like Johnny Isaakson and Saxby Chambliss (who got booed at the Georgia GOP convention as Lindsey F'ing Grahamnesty did at South Carolina's) have gotten the message.