Illegal immigration is going to happen. It’s a source of cheap labor and, like it or not, that’s fairly important to the economy as it stands. If you’re going to dismiss any policy that could turn them into tax paying citizens because “there shouldn’t be illegal immigrants in the first place” then you will never find a solution you’ll like.

There are illegals. Accept it. The only way to get rid of them is to give them a reason to come forward. So unless you have some master plan to find and deport illegals and prevent them from coming back AND do so without causing an economic depression AND without costing more taxes than illegals would be paying anyway, I’d love to hear it.

Much of this money then leaves our economy in order to be sent to families of Mexican workers. So the entire reason we’re supposed to tolerate criminals as good for us is out the window… because it’s not good for the US economy at all.

The reasons businesses wail and whine about how illegal immigrants are vital to the success of our nation is because illegal immigration allows them to get richer faster by unethically breaking the law, at the expense of the American middle and lower classes.

Secondly, I’m not rejecting a “potential solution” because it’s not perfect. I’m rejecting it because I think it will do little to no good, and will do much harm.

The problem is that there are people here who broke the law by entering the country illegally, and more are coming. They undermine the rule of law, consume resources, and make it harder for law abiding people, including immigrants who made their way through the system legally, such as my sister in law, to gain citizenship, because quotas on legal immigration are restricted.

Any proposal to give law breakers legal benefits for breaking the law only encourages more people to break the same law.

Now, “turning them into citizens” does not solve the problem, because they have already shown themselves to be people with less respect for the law than other people we could allow to come here and become citizens. They entered the country illegally, and no matter what we do (save causing them not to be here any more) still leaves them here!

However until we work on our borders, any solution aimed at those already here, be it amnesty, or deportation, is like trying to bail water out of a boat that is leaking it in faster than you can bail it out. You plug the hole, then bail.

Is illegal immigration still going to happen no mater what we do? Well duh, of course it is. I just want to get the incoming leek down to a slow trickle so that we can manage what is coming in more effectively.

Any plan that meets the following criteria will have my approval.

Step 1. Implement measures to cut illegal immigration in half (at least).
Step 2. Evaluate to see if step 1 worked. If not, skip step 3.
Step 3. Deal with the people already here.

According to a news article I saw on fox news earlier today, step 1 is already underway, but hasn’t reached a reasonable cut off yet. New technology has been implemented which allows us to better apprehend illegals crossing our southern border. Some units of the national guard have also been allocated to help back up us border agents.

Since these measures have been implemented, the number of illegals that have been apprehended has gone down 24%. While some say this could simply be due to less of them being caught, I think that this is belied by the fact that we have more manpower and more sophisticated technology in place, as well as the fact that drug runners and illegals are becoming more violent in their attempts to invade the country, and have been described as being more desperate.

In the first place, there was the unseemly haste with which the Senate tried to push the bill through - a matter of weeks rather than the usual months-long timeline most bills experience.

There was the matter of Senator Reid and his compatriots re-introducing the bill after its first round of defeat. Then followed the most dramatic legislative prestidigitation I have ever cared to witness, whereby Senator Reid invoked an arcane Senate rule capping amendments to legislation at 24, then filled all twenty-four slots with amendments crafted by his allies and others who promised to vote for the bill. What’s more, amendments were written and attached with more regard to the legislative capability (that is, the ability to get the bill passed at all) than with the feasibility or practicality of those amendments.

As if that wasn’t enough, Reid limited opponents of the bill to 15 minutes maximum, while supporters were permitted over 30 minutes and even allowed to exceed those limits while opponents were forced to cede the floor rapidly after their fifteen minute mark. This is assuming the Senators actually read either the bill or the amendments, and given the timeframe, amendments were hitting the floor for vote before Senators even had time to read through them.

On top of all this was the sheer acrimony of the debate from both sides of the aisle. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina threw more than one histrionic fit on the Senate floor, while other pro-bill senators spoke about the pressing need to “do something” and do it now, seemingly without regard to consequences. Further, supporters of the bill did not stop at chastising the slow speed of the debate but also maligning the motives of anyone who raised objections to the bill. Accusations of bigotry and racism were just the beginning, and I am particularly enamored of those high-minded Senators who, from their lofty perches high in the stratosphere, characterized the majority of the American public as only slightly to the left of the Nazis.

When Teddy Kennedy, “The Orca of Chappaquiddick,” and George W. Bush both agree on the same piece of legislation, you’d best put one hand on your wallet and the other on the buzzer because something horrifying is about to happen. When Senators dismiss criticism as “intimidation” and mutter darkly about “dealing with” the “problem” of talk radio “running the country,” when more than 70% of the American public thinks you might want to slow down and look a little closer at the bill you’re working with, when you use every trick in the book to quash dissent and stifle the opposition (And I’m pointing the finger at bodies on both sides of the aisle), then you make a mockery of representative government and give a great big honking bird to the people you are supposed to be serving.

So let me just say, thanks a lot Senators Ted “Chappaquiddick” Kennedy, Lindsey Grahmnesty, Trent “Goat Fence” Lott, and the big kahuna, the immeasurably incompetent Harry Reid. Your open disgust and disdain for even the motions of democracy is duly noted.

To illustrate this fallacy, imagine Hitler saying “I like puppies.” Now, does this make puppies evil? Of course not! Puppies are good. Especially with ketchup.

I’ll cherry-pick one point - the Z-Visa bit. Supposedly the DHS can handle a rush of 8 million or 10 million applications with minimal trouble, while the State Department is struggling mightily to process a surge of 6 million passport applications due to a change in laws. Ingenuous? Perhaps. It displays either a comforting or disturbing level of faith in the ability of the current bureaucracy to cope with sudden changes.

Again, an aside. Your argument, as far as I can tell, can be boiled down to this: Since we can’t solve the problem, we might as well just accept it. Or, to simplify further: Give up. Just call them something else so the problem goes away. However, that doesn’t actually dismiss the issue. We still face a growing strain on social services in portions of the country where illegal immigration is most prevalent. We also face an influx of undesireables - and I don’t mean Mexicans.

No, I’m not going to conjure up spectres of terrorist infiltrators slipping in with Jose and Gorge. I’m concerned about the other criminals slipping in. Gang members. Predators. Those who come here to exploit the system at the expense of others, those who come here to take advantage of our freedom and, yes, hospitality. To wit, I say the one change to the current situation that few people could honestly argue against is this - “Deport the Predators First.”

If an illegal immigrant has committed a felony crime (aside from entering the country illegally, of course), or a series of misdemeanors (like DUIs, for instance), once their sentence is up they get deported and their name goes on a watch list so, ideally, re-entry isn’t quite as easy. I’m not going to show off my naivete and say it would then be impossible.

Problems require workable solutions. Not perfect solutions, and not relabeling. Both are avoiding the question in their own way. The most recent bill was an inadequate solution, but so what? Hopefully the right people learned something from it, and the experience wasn’t wasted. Issues like this require time and deliberation, not hastily-crafted pabulums to snag a few votes in what looks to be a bruising election cycle.

First argument:
Josh’s original post dismissed any ideas that did not end with punishing and removing illegal immigrants. Ideal, but utterly unworkable. The choice to dismiss potential solutions in favor of an ideal is logically flawed.

Second argument:
Your original post dismissed the bill due to “the ensuing act of political theater”. That theater has nothing at all to do with the bill’s impact and therefor is irrelevant.

This argument:
I would have enjoyed making an argument on the merits of proposed immigration policy, but I have no interest at all in the debate that has supplanted it.

Whatever we want to do, be it amnesty, deportation, or (as the natzis would do) murdering them and throwing their dead bodies in mass graves, we must first secure our borders. To note, since we would never mass murder people of a given ethnicity, that puts us very far off from the Nazi’s. Thus, I am decrying the proposal of the bill as being something that is premature to other measures that must happen first.

DerImpresario has said that to “Just call them something else so the problem goes away”, which I assume to be his view on granting them amnesty, will not solve anything. That’s addressed at one aim of the bill as well.

He has brought up problem with the legislation it’s self, and brought up something from the legislation he would support. I don’t see how we have abandoned debate of the material in the bill it’s self.

On top of that, if you don’t have a chance to read a bill in it’s entirety before voting on it, you should generally vote against it. Our legal system is built on the premise that laws will be read and debated by those working on them. I have no problem with re-introducing a bill, with the hopes that it will pass the second time. What I do have a problem with is not allowing a person to study a proposal they are expected to vote on until they have the chance to vote on it.

And if I am studying the implication of a bill, and am expected to vote based on the public debate, if I see that one side is getting cut off as they are trying to make their points, and being given less time, I will likely be of the opinion that I am not getting all of the information or opinions about negative implications to the bill. Again, a perfectly valid reason to vote against it.

But, back to the bill’s actual mertits. We will always have illegals coming across our border. However, in my opinion, one goal of legislature regarding illegal immigrants, should be to decrease that number in a reasonable fashion, such as the legislation enacted in Arizona.

If we grant legally mandated benefits of any kind to illegal immigrants, this encourages more to come across the border. This includes giving them a chance to stay in (or re-enter) the country while applying for citizenship. Because of this, I am against the granting of amnesty, but especially while we are still in the process of securing our borders.

Unfortunately, when you cannot do that, you have no choice but to vote it down.

However, if there is a specific point of the bill you believe is a good one, I would love to hear, and debate that particular part.

Point one:
To dismiss possible solutions because they fall short of perfection is, indeed, unwise. To accept whatever solution is put forward without forethought is also unwise. To do nothing is to make the problem worse, but to actively worsen the problem is a more hazardous course. The legislation has been considered, and found critically wanting. “First do no harm.”

Point two:
No, it is not irrelevant, because that sideshow throws some very stark illumination on what is wrong with the process in D.C. concerning the issue. We can debate the merits of the bill itself until we’re blue in the face, but the facts on the ground are these: The bill is dead, and its supporters tried every dirty trick in the book to get it through. No bill worth the ink it’s printed with has ever passed without a tough fight. This bill should not be any exception.

Point three:
At this point, it’s less than worth my time to plow through the ungainly monstrosity of the bill, and from my readings of the “Reader’s Digest” version where they translated it from Legalese into somewhat-readible English, the provisions would have done nothing that isn’t already on the books for combating the issue. A better answer from both Congress and the White House would be more vigorous enforcement of existing laws and perhaps a review of priorities. Particularly where resource expenditure is concerned.