Echoes in Eternity

As most people know, the Senate has crafted a new immigration reform bill. The main component involves amnesty for all the current illegal immigrants in the country. While I am not much of a immigration bore, preferring to leave that issue to others to debate, I cannot understand how it's good for our justice system to allow illegal immigrants to become legal via "Z visas" with only a minor slap on the wrist (paying 2 of the last 3 years of income taxes). After all, which legal resident of the U.S. wouldn't love to only pay taxes two-thirds of the time? Besides that, it is my understanding that this bill doesn't do much for border enforcement, which, to those of us concerned about the possibility of more radical Muslims sneaking in to bomb our cities and attack our military bases, is more important than the economic or criminal aspects of illegal immigration.

Any conservative Republican who supports this bill will find his re-election campaign suffering from extremely apathetic support from his base. Even Democrats are already getting an earful from their constituents. As Mark Steyn says this week in his Chicago Sun-Times column,

This is a very divided political culture in which bipartisanship is all but nonexistent on everything else, starting with war and national security. So, when the political class is in lockstep bipartisan mode, that's sufficiently unusual all by itself. When it's in bipartisan mode on an issue on which the public is diametrically opposed, that looks less like bipartisanship and more like the lockstep myopia of an out-of-touch one-party state.
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The reluctance of Washington to be seen to enforce its own borders is very perplexing. From the "Washington sniper" to 9/11, there has been for a generation a clear national-security component to the illegal immigration issue. To present it only as a matter of "the jobs Americans won't do" is lazily reductive. The economists may see the vast human tide as an army of much-needed hotel maids and farm workers and nurses and plumbers, but to assume that everyone on the planet sees themselves as primarily an economic entity is complacent and (post-Sept. 11) obtusely deluded. The political class' urge to capitulate on the integrity of the national border sends as important a message to the world about American will as their urge to capitulate on Iraq.