In the current political climate you've got better odds of sprouting wings and flying. We can't even get them to stop the anchor baby bandwagon.
Though the overall Kennedy-McCain bill was of course horrible, some of its components were at least somewhat admirable.
I give Senator Kyl credit for getting what I believe he considered to be a genuine end to chain migration, and a move towards a merit-based point system. The problem, of course, was that it would not have gone into effect for eight years, and during that eight yr period chain migration would actually have been greatly increased to ‘clear the backlog.’ I guess Kyl has more faith in his fellow members of Congress, but I never believed that the transition would take place after the eight years, especially if the Dems were to have the Presidency and Congress, or if there were a Bush-like Republican president and a Dem Congress. Why would the Dems allow an end to a system guaranteed to mint them millions of new voters in exchange for something with at least some uncertainty? Again, I believe they’d still win with a large-scale point system, but the margin would probably not be as great. So at most, I could have seen the Dems allowing more skills-based immigration, but only in addition to massive chain migration, not in place of it.
I also heard that the defeated bill would have ended the Diversity Visa Lottery, but I never could pin that down one way or another. Still, it was a shame that the provisions dealing with legal immigration, and unending chain migration specifically, did not get more attention. They did represent improvement over the 2006 version of the amnesty bill, but unfortunately all of the improvements were really promises for action years down the road. This points to another problem with trying to do everything with one bill. They should construct a real reform to legal immigration that takes place either immediately, or in the very near future, and not tie it to amnesty. And if some amnesty is the price to be paid, then the end to chain migration should be immediate.