Things to Like in the Immigration Bill - What conservatives are missing.

The Weekly Standard ^ | June 1st, 2007 | Fred Barnes

[JohnLocke23]

Conservatives are sometimes blind to what's in their own best interest. This is especially true on immigration, all the more so on the narrower matter of the bipartisan immigration reform bill now before the Senate. The bill gives conservatives a large chunk of what they've wanted for years, plus some things they don't want. The balance is heavily in their favor, though, and they're crazy to oppose this once-in-a-lifetime chance to stop illegal immigration and enact sensible policies for legal immigration.

At the top of the list of what conservatives can get is significantly beefed-up security along America's southern border. And that's just what's in the initial bill negotiated by Republican senator Jon Kyl and Democratic senator Ted Kennedy. Without blowing up the Kyl-Kennedy compromise, border enforcement can be further strengthened through amendments. Indeed, it was strengthened, in the first week of debate in May, with an amendment by Republican senator Judd Gregg that requires "demonstrated" operational control of the entire border with Mexico.

Then there's the "trigger," a brainstorm of Republican senator Johnny Isakson. It delays further reform--including issuance of Z visas allowing the estimated 12 million illegals in the United States to stay indefinitely--until all the steps to tighten border security have been taken.

[garbanzo]

Your honesty is refreshing but why do you want to exclude non-mexicans by and large from immigrating to our country?

I never said I wanted to "by and large" exclude non-Mexican immigration. The reality is that Mexico does border the US and much of the immigration problem does seem to stem from Mexican immigration - I find little concern about Canadian immigration (legal or otherwise) by contrast. More realistic limits on legal Mexican immigration would seem to solve the issues surrounding illegal immigrants.

[mthom]

Meeting mexican demand for immigration means keeping out immigrants from other places. Why do you think its just fine to do so?

“I find little concern about Canadian immigration (legal or otherwise) by contrast.”

The reason for that would be that there is so little of either. Canada is a country of only 20 million.

[garbanzo]

Meeting mexican demand for immigration means keeping out immigrants from other places. Why do you think its just fine to do so?

In principle it doesn't. We could keep immigration quotas from other countries just as they are and still raise the quotas from Mexico. Personally, I don't really have much of a problem with raising overall total legal immigration quotas.

Even if we didn't, I'd say that Mexico and Canada are special cases just because they border the US. With most other places, you do have a chokepoint at points of entry into the US via plane or ship while with Mexico and Canada you have thousands of miles of border to guard and many places for border control to fail. Reasonably, we should have a different policy with respect to these different situations.

BTW the population of Canada is 33 million and Mexico is 108 million.