I doubt that love is lovelier the second time around, and immigration reform is certainly not. But how bad is it? At Hugh Hewitt, Mary Katharine Ham summarizes the conference call with former Attorney General Meese and Heritage Foundation fellow Matt Spalding that Heritage arranged yesterday to follow up on Meese’s New York Times column on the Senate bill’s amnesty provision.
The problem is not just the bill’s amnesty provision, though the amnesty provision is profoundly unjust and misguided. Thomas Sowell, for example, has explored the amnesty issue in what is now a series of three devastating columns: “Bordering on fraud (1),” “Bordering on fraud (2)” and “Bordering on fraud (3).” Moreover, as the Meese column demonstrates, the current amnesty proposal repeats the framework of the 1986 amnesty that helped bring us to our present pass.
Yet amnesty is probably not the worst element of the Senate/administration “comprehensive immigration reform.” The closer one looks at the Senate bill, the unlovelier it appears. See, for example, John O’Sullivan’s “Foul law,” and the Heritage papers “Immigration reform or central planning” by Tim Kane and “Permanent principles and temporary workers” by Meese and Spalding.
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