Today's New York Times and Washington Post ran news articles about how a group of eight senators has cobbled together a "comprehensive immigration reform" plan that will introduce a massive amnesty program after some "tougher enforcement" strategies have been put in place.
The proposed enhancements of immigration enforcement are largely symbolic and are designed to sound good, rather than to actually reduce the populations of legal and illegal immigrants.
Here's a little checklist on some of the weakest of these proposals:
| Senatorial Strategies | Problems with Those Strategies | Really Useful Alternative Strategies |
| Fines for amnestied illegal aliens | DHS will always figure a way to waive most of them | Charge employers of legal guestworkers much higher fees |
| More Border Patrol agents | Repeatedly increasing the number of agents has done little to reduce the size of the illegal population | Put more agents in jobsites where illegals concentrate; strengthen interior enforcement |
| Force amnestied illegal aliens to repay back taxes | IRS not really interested; it would rather spend the same amount of time on people with real money, and collect more revenue that way | Levy 1% withholding (for income tax) on all individual wires of money to overseas locations |
| Make amnestied illegals go to the back of the line for green cards | This will just create pressure for easing these limits later | Eliminate some classes of family immigration, such as siblings of citizens, and nieces and nephews of U.S. citizens |
| More drones for the Border Patrol | A truly silly symbolic ploy; the Border Patrol rarely uses the ones it has | Eliminate the Diversity Visa, reducing legal immigration by 50,000 a year |
You can be sure, on the other hand, that the amnesty program proposed by these senators will work as planned, and pretty soon — more drones or not — we will be on the road to having 11 or 12 million new legal aliens, with oodles of new illegals sure to follow.