Border Blues

Fire of Liberty

While President Bush's speech on illegal immigration provides conservatives(I'm a little hopeful)with a little hope via promises to beef up the border patrol by hiring more border patrol workers and sending a 6,000 man National Guard contingent, going after employers that hire illegals, creating a biometric id card to verify legals from illegals, calling on the end of the "catch-and-release" policies as well as a call for greater assimilation. The only problem is that optimism is pretty much washed away when you delve further into the speech and discover that no matter how much you dress it up, the President is really just pushing his "comprehensive immigration reform". Yet again President Bush is teaming up with John McCain and Teddy Kennedy to push through another immigration reform bill that will solve nothing but create an incentive for more illegal immigrants to come in thus creating the same problem some twenty years in the future. I'm guessing he's thinking that he can assuage his base and the fellows across the aisle just to get this bill passed. One individual that seems to have cut through the rhetoric and struck the bone of the whole matter over the President's speech on immigration is National Review Online's David Frum who made the following observation in his blog David Frum's Diary:

When the Bush administration fitfully attempts to enforce the immigration laws, it looks for measures that meet four criteria:

They must be 1) spectacular; 2) expensive; 3) unsustainable; and 4) ineffective.

The proposal to deploy the National Guard to the border meets all four!

This plan won't work, and it is not seriously meant to work. It's supposed to look dramatic and buy the president some respite from negative polls - and then it is supposed to fail, strengthening the administration's case for its truly preferred approach: amnesty + guestworkers.

While I'm not fully on board with all of Frum's ideas that he notes in his diary, he's right on the money about the totality of the President's immigration reform policy. I would just like to see folks enforce the laws on illegal immigration rather than proposing some news laws that create greater problems. The most regrettable thing about such a policy is that President Bush is souring his base just for the sake of attracting a specific voting body that is more likely than not going to vote for the Democrats. From the looks of it, it seems to me that President Bush needs to visit the heartland and stop listening to folks in the beltway. It'll do him some good.