The thing that concerns me about any sort of immigration law reform is that every few years they re-invent the same laws. Each time they work in amnesty and gravy parts for the illegal aliens. They are always quick to hand out the amnesty and gravy parts but they never do get around to the enforcement parts of the laws.

Do they really need a shiny new set of laws when they have never given the old comprehensive laws a test drive?

http://www.vdare.com/rubenstein/051101_nd.htm

Notices of intent to fine employers:

1997: 865
1999: 417
2000: 178
2001: 100
2003: 162
2004: 3

Worksite arrests of illegal alien workers:

1997: 17,554
1999: 2,849
2000: 953
2001: 735
2003: 445
2004: 159

Lets put it this way, I have a feeling that anyone of us could read through this bill and find many places where it is broken in our opinion. I doubt very much that it requires State and local governments to work within the law. So Sanctuary cities will probably continue. My understanding is that the Z-visa check has a very big loophole, if its not done in 24 hours they get it by default.

If its not going to be a good bill, a well thought out bill, then it shouldn’t be passed. Even if it is a good bill, prior to passing it, we should rigorously enforce the current law first. After doing that for a while, there would be good information to actually base the bill on. Right now there isn’t.

The numbers on illegal aliens are between 11 and 20 million, a big gap between the two estimates. DHS and the Pew research center put the number at around 11 million. The Wall Street financial firm Bear Stearns said the number could be as high as 20 million based on a comprehensive study of the underground economy. The Bear Stearns report also said that 3 million illegals were entering the country each year.

http://washingtontimes.com/national/20060818-113931-6322r.htm

As Bear Stearns put it ‘Our research has identified significant evidence that the census estimates of undocumented immigrants may be capturing as little as half of the total undocumented population,” the report said. “This gross undercounting is a serious accounting issue, which could ultimately lead to government policy errors in the future.”

U.S. Congressman John Culberson has a peice on his web page about the effect
of amnesty on Social Security. There really needs to be more discussion in
the open about this bill. I find it negligent and dasterdly that that the
press and government are not fully discussing both sides and all the issues.
It seems that their intention is to instead ram it through and afterwards we
just have to deal with it.

http://www.culberson.house.gov/news.aspx?A=269

To do that, all you need to do is establish a hefty incentive for illegal immigrants to rat out people who illegally employ them. Mark Kleiman has proposed a “poetic justice” version of this where an illegal who rats his employer out gets a green card in exchange. More prosaically, a ratter out could get a one-way ticket back to his home country plus a big fat check financed through employer fines. An enforcement system like this would be cheap to administer since you mostly wouldn’t need to administer it at all — illegal immigrants looking for a bonus, and potential employers of illegal immigrants afraid of being caught in a sting, would do the vast majority of the work.

Matthew Yglesias

Sounds like a creative solution.

Any passable bill will require compromise. What’s the compromise between those two positions?

I don’t trust our national government in its current state to competently solve or accomplish anything of true importance to the people, unless it has to do with improving the profits of big business.

Since the bill was proposed this week and will be finished by next week. It appears that official DC has decided that immigration is just not an important issue. Thus, the bill will pass and then will quickly be ignored.