Immigration Theater

Mark Steyn has a good perspective on the illegal immigration amnesty bill, rightly labeling the debacle nothing more than political theater.

So the question is: Why is enforcement of U.S. immigration somewhere between minimal and nonexistent? By some estimates, half of all illegals have arrived on George W. Bush's watch -- i.e., they broke into a nation at war with borders supposedly on permanent "orange" alert.

To return to the 72-virgin jackpot, even the looniest jihad-inciting imam understands that human nature responds to incentive, to the tradeoff between obligation and reward. But the immigration bill is all reward and no obligations. The only clause that matters is the first one: the mandatory open-ended probationary legal status the bill will confer the moment it's passed. All the rest -- the enforcement provisions on border agents and security fences that will supposedly "trigger" Z-visas and then green cards -- is nonsense, most of which will never happen. If you're "undocumented," you don't care about whether your Z-visa leads to citizenship 15 years from now: What counts is crossing the line from illegal to legal, which in this bill happens first, happens instantly and happens (to all intents and purposes) irreversibly. All the rest is Beltway kabuki.

Imagine if 20,000,000 burglers were not only instantly pardoned but also immediately given free reign to continue their theft legally. It's outrageous, and all the more so because of the American citizens who have aided, abetted, and profited from these thieves over the past decades.

And of course there's always the War on Terror angle.

Kathryn, that Cornyn amendment is a good example of the kind of final "bipartisan compromise" Congress may settle for: The 12-20 million illegal immigrants will get legal residency in the United States by the end of the next business day (and, incidentally, I'd love to see a list of other US agencies which guarantee full service within 24 hours - or is the express line only available to lawbreaking foreigners?), but terrorists will have to be subjected to what Sheila Jackson-Lee described to me as an "ongoing background check".

The more you look at this bill the more it seems just the usual Beltway kabuki. Secretary Chertoff says in a time of war we need to know who's in the country. Okay. But is dumping a gazillion new applications on a sclerotic immigration system the way to do that? Mohammed Atta was the second most famous terrorist in the world and on the front page of every American newspaper but the then INS still sent him a valid US visa six months to the day after he died, and without even updating his address from that Florida flight school to Big Hole In The Ground, Lower Manhattan. And the excuse the agency made was, oh well, we're only issuing visas to dead terrorists not living ones - which Americans pretty much had to take on trust and which seems a distinction far less likely to be maintained once there's another 15 million in the system entitled to next-day service. If I were Mullah Omar, I'd apply for a Z-visa. The odds have got to be better than even.

It's just insane. Truly.