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To: bentway who wrote (51658)	4/9/2006 4:42:27 AM
From: Mick Mørmøny	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 306849

Bipartisan border betrayal By now, you've seen media reports about the Senate's "failure" to enact a new immigration law last week. Don't be fooled. The "failure" is actually progress. Doing nothing is far better than enacting a reckless piece of fiction masquerading as reform, which is what the Senate was about to do before the scam collapsed. This is one of those times when gridlock was a good thing, and when bipartisanship was a conspiracy against the truth. Any senator who signed up for the fraudulent bill ought to be arrested for impersonating a public official. Start with Republican Bill Frist and Democrat Harry Reid, the majority and minority leaders, respectively, and throw in John McCain and Ted Kennedy, the prime architects of this political dirty trick on the public. Shame on all of them. Just as the devil is in the details, so were the lies of the rejected legislation. The biggest whopper was the preposterous claim that the federal government could conduct thorough background checks on 11 million illegal immigrants already here. Presumably those checks would be more rigorous than the one on Bernie Kerik, the former NYPD boss whose alleged misdeeds were uncovered by the Daily News and other media before he could become the head of Homeland Security. And the Internal Revenue Service, that bastion of efficiency and clarity, was supposed to collect back taxes from those 11 million. On the basis of what documentation? Many illegal immigrants are paid in unreported cash, so there is simply no way to accurately calculate how much each owes. And what about those who had fake documents, such as Social Security cards? Would they get off scot-free? In fact, those goofy provisions would have required a new wave of bureaucrats wielding rubber stamps. The result would have been mass naturalizations - which is amnesty without having the honesty to admit it. That would have been an invitation for still others to come here. And that's not the worst of it. The bill went from bad to bizarre with a provision that would have created three categories of illegal immigrants and applied different rules to each, depending on how long they've been in the U.S. The earlier an immigrant broke the law, the more rights he would have. How nutty is that? Again, the logistics would be overwhelming. Other than those who came on visas and overstayed, how would authorities know when an individual came? They couldn't, but that didn't stop Senators from both parties from calling their bill "reform." Even on its best days, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is swamped, with huge backlogs and long delays routine. Those immigrants who play by the rules know the horrors: It now takes as long as 24 years for a foreign sibling of a citizen to get a family preference visa. Someone who marries a U.S. citizen abroad will wait more than 2 years just for an interview as part of the process of moving here. There are thousands of felons and others with deportation orders who are roaming free because there aren't enough officers to track them down. The honest hard work of immigration reform must begin with stopping the flood of illegals. Whether it's Mexicans who sneak across the southern border or Irish students who overstay their visas, the problem is the same: America has lost control of who comes into this country. Until that control is regained, there can be no such thing as immigration reform. Originally published on April 9, 2006 nydailynews.com