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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: KLP who wrote (20042)	5/23/2007 12:09:05 AM
From: Peter Dierks	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 71588

This is what the WSJ has to say. They tend to be pro Amnesty at times and pro security at others. Ultimately, what Michelle Malkin has been saying makes more sense than anything I have heard. <>Immigration Opening The Bush-Kennedy proposal's vices and virtues. Saturday, May 19, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT The White House and key Senators struck an immigration deal this week that looks like the best chance in years to balance border security with human and economic realities. There's room for improvement and a long way to go before any reform becomes law, but Senators Jon Kyl of Arizona and Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts deserve high marks for making progress. On the plus side, the bill addresses the 12 million undocumented aliens living in the U.S. by providing a way for most to obtain legal status with minimal disruption to their lives or employers. In return for reporting to authorities, paying a $5,000 fine, passing a criminal-background check and making a "touch back" visit to their home country, illegal aliens would be eligible for a "Z" visa allowing them to keep working here. Restrictionists are calling this "amnesty," but they were going to slap that label on anything this side of mass deportation. The public is understandably upset about the presence of so many illegal aliens in the U.S. But there is no evidence that voters want millions of foreign families--many of whom have been here for decades and have American children--uprooted and forcibly removed from the country. The restrictionist wing of the GOP simply wants no new immigration, and "amnesty" is merely a political slogan to kill any reform. Another major part of the legislation is more problematic: This would shift immigration away from family ties and toward a merit-based model that favors better-educated immigrants with higher skills. The stated justification for this change is that the U.S. currently admits too few skilled workers due to unchecked "chain migration," which facilitates the entry of unschooled and unskilled kin. That's hard to credit, however, considering data that show the typical legal immigrant already has a higher skill level than the typical American. We're all for admitting the world's best and brightest, but the economic benefits of immigration also derive from the way immigrant skills complement the U.S. work force. Foreign workers make the U.S. more productive because they complement us at both the high and low ends of the skills spectrum. Remove the low-end leg of the stool, and you make the economy less productive and natives worse off. Why? Because we'll be using our human capital less efficiently. Natives may end up doing jobs they're overqualified to do, or those jobs will disappear altogether and diminish our quality of life. Immigrants comprise 14% of U.S. workers, though everyone knows they're overrepresented in such lower-skill occupations as farming (47%), construction (27%), food preparation (24%) and custodial work (36%). Less well-known is that these are the same businesses that the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts will experience high demand for future jobs. Any "merit-based" system that is too rigid runs the risk of putting immigration policy out of sync with the needs of an expanding U.S. economy. Which brings us to the Senate bill's biggest flaw: the guest-worker program. The U.S. has so many illegal immigrants in part because there aren't enough legal ways to enter the country. A guest-worker program is the best way to allow that legal entry, but the Senate's version isn't up to the task. It would make available some 400,000 "Y" visas per year, and the cap would be adjusted annually based on market fluctuations. So far, so good. The problem is that these Y visas, which are good for two years and renewable up to three times, would require the worker to return home for a year in between each renewal. There's no economic reason for creating such turnover red tape and denying employers the benefit of experienced employees. The complexity would discourage compliance, especially among workers who might decide to enter the black market (or never leave it) rather than jump through these hoops. The bill also calls for more interior "enforcement." So in addition to hiring 18,000 more border patrol agents, and erecting 370 miles of fence, GOP lawmakers want to harass businesses by increasing the penalties for unlawful hiring and require employers to electronically verify the immigration status of new employees. These conditions come from the same Republicans who say we can't repeat the mistakes of the 1986 immigration overhaul, which also featured employer sanctions. We realize any immigration reform is going to require compromise, and this Senate bill's complications reflect that political necessity. It's a genuine cross-party bargain, a "center-out" compromise that is already under fire from the restrictionist right, the Big Labor left, and Lou Dobbsian opportunists. Senate sages are predicting 70 votes in support next week, but it's an ominous sign that the ever-calculating Democrat Chuck Schumer is already expressing his doubts; his real goal may be to deny President Bush any legislative success. A bipartisan immigration bill would be good for the country if it truly leads to fewer illegals while allowing the flow of workers our economy needs. The Senate bill takes us only half way there. opinionjournal.com