Comprehensively awful: what President Bush and Senator Kennedy have wrought.

ODD though it may seem to those following the debate on "comprehensive immigration reform," the most important element in the Senate bill is not whether it amounts to an amnesty for illegal immigrants. More important provisions are the number of immigrants it would admit in the future, the fiscal costs of admitting them and of legalizing the illegals already here, its effect on partisan politics, and much else. If these were the issues grabbing the headlines, the bill would be seen for what it is: a large, costly, and damaging assault on the American taxpayer and the U.S. political system.

Still, everyone wants to discuss amnesty--so let's get it out of the way. Here is a textbook definition of "amnesty" from no less an authority than a former U.S. attorney general, Edwin Meese III:

   Amnesty is an act by which past acts are forgotten and expunged
   from the record for future purposes. In the context of immigration,
   amnesty is most commonly defined as granting legal status to a
   defined group of individuals who are unlawfully present in the
   United States; that is, overlooking or forgetting the ongoing
   illegal presence in the United States in favor of adjusting that
   presence to a legal status. The granting of legal status is still
   an amnesty even if it is conditional and not automatic or does
   not lead to citizenship.

We could end the discussion at this point. The Meese definition disposes of the administration's argument that the Senate bill is not an amnesty because it requires an illegal alien to pay a fine before being granted citizenship. An amnesty is still an amnesty if it comes with conditions.

What this bill offers, however, goes well beyond amnesty. As the administration's argument makes plain (presumably inadvertently) by referring only to citizenship, the payment of a fine is not a condition that an alien must meet to stay in the country legally. Under the terms of the bill, the holder of a "probationary Z visa" can stay indefinitely without paying a wooden nickel. Only if he wants to go further and obtain U.S. citizenship must he pay a fine. He is then forgiven any backlog of unpaid taxes he may have accumulated in his long illegal residence. The president insisted on that provision because, according to a White House spokesman, "determining the past tax liability would have been very difficult and costly and extremely time-consuming" (not unlike my tax returns). And let's not forget that, in addition, the illegal alien also obtains the bonus of U.S. citizenship. This is said to be worth at least $100,000 on the international market.

If citizenship were transferable, paying the fine and selling the citizenship would be a no-brainer. As it is, many and perhaps most illegal aliens are not especially interested in becoming citizens. (Nor were many legal immigrants until citizenship became a requirement for some welfare benefits.) What they want is the right to live and work in America. The bill grants them this right without any penalty for past transgressions. That alone makes it an amnesty. But the whole package amounts to Amnesty Plus--an immigration and tax amnesty in one, with citizenship thrown in.

It would probably be wiser if the White House and the senators supporting the bill were to throw up their hands, admit, "Hey, sure, it's an amnesty," and change the subject. The more they protest, the more we skeptics are encouraged to delve into the extent and generosity of the privileges extended to illegal aliens. And the more we discover, the less we are inclined to trust what they tell us about the rest of the bill.

Several commentators, notably Jonah Goldberg on NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE, have noticed this unease. They argue that the strong popular and conservative resistance to the bill is explained less by its actual provisions than by the distrust ordinary Americans feel for politicians who have misled them in the past. That critique is accurate as far as it goes. President Bush's record is particularly problematic. His enforcement policy has been modeled on the Texan standard: "All hat and no cattle." Worksite arrests for immigration violations, for instance, fell sharply under him, to a mere 159 in 2004 from a high of several thousand under President Clinton--a decline of something like 97 percent (and 9/11 had occurred in the meantime). Yet whenever a debate on immigration is pending, the feds mount a dramatic workplace raid. Last April, when an earlier version of the present immigration bill was about to be presented to Congress, federal agents swooped in on plants in 26 states that belonged to a U.S. subsidiary of a Dutch company, IFCO. They arrested 1,187 illegal-immigrant workers and deported 275 of them.

As the skeptical Michelle Malkin predicted on her blog, however, four-fifths of those arrested were released into the community almost immediately--even before homeland-security chief Michael Chertoff had made a well-publicized speech highlighting his department's new toughness. Perhaps Malkin's criticism irritated Chertoff, because he did toughen up enforcement over the next year. In 2006 no fewer than 716 people were charged with criminal violation of immigration law. That compares with only 25 criminal arrests back in 2002--and testifies to the fact that immigration was a major political issue throughout this period. An even larger raid than that on IFCO was launched later in the year, with success.

EXCUSES, EXCUSES

However useful politically, and however episodic, these raids tend to undercut one of the main arguments offered for the bill by its proponents: the idea that we simply can't mount workplace raids, arrest violators, and either deport or charge them--it would be un-American, and horrify the people. But if we can't do that, how come we actually do that whenever the administration wants to look tough on immigration? And how come such raids are not just greeted as acceptable, but are positively popular? If such firm enforcement of the law were the norm instead of an occasional and dramatic exception, illegal workers would soon be deterred, by all the risks of crossing the border, from seeking a job that might well not exist. Borders are porous today in part because the economic gains of crossing them are both substantial and secure once the immigrant gets through. Enforcement of immigration law by employer sanctions would significantly strengthen the border by reducing the incentives and increasing the risks of crossing. Once the supply of low-paid illegals dried up, moreover, wages would rise, bringing American workers out of the shadows to do those jobs that Americans "won't" do. This so-called attrition strategy is not mere theory; both of these effects have occurred following tough and well-publicized enforcement of the law. And as we have seen, the government itself acts on this logic when doing so suits its purposes.

So workplace crackdowns designed to smooth the passage of amnesty-plus-guest-worker legislation inadvertently demonstrate the practicality of the alternative policy of "enforcement first." Call it the law of unintended insights. That said, Goldberg's point--that the resistance to the new bill arises from distrust of manipulative leaders--rests on solid foundations. Alas, that does not exonerate the bill. For its text is saturated with obscure provisions as fraudulent as anything in recent political history. Here are a few examples:

First, the bill's "temporary" Z visa will be available to the applicant while he is waiting for his background check to be completed. But according to Kris Kobach, a former adviser to the attorney general on immigration law, it can be renewed indefinitely until the holder dies. This allows the holder to work, attend college, and (in Kobach's words) "do just about anything else." It even allows a gang member to remain in the U.S., provided he sign a "renunciation of gang affiliation." Nothing lasts like the provisional, say the French, and America, not to be outdone, is set to prove the truth of that statement by offering the world's first permanent temporary visa.

Second, Z visas proper (i.e., non-temporary ones) are supposed to be issued only when a number of "trigger" provisions indicating greater border security have been met. But these triggers are worded in such a way as to virtually guarantee that the Homeland Security Department will declare that they have been met and that visas should therefore be issued. One trigger states, for instance, that 370 miles of border fence must be constructed before the visas can be issued. But the Secure Fence Act of last year authorized the building of 700 miles of fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border. Thus the trigger lies well below the amount of fencing that Congress has already approved.

Third, the bill is presented as a move away from family reunification to a skills-based immigration policy that will supposedly end "chain migration." For the next decade or so, however, the rate of chain migration for extended-family members would actually triple--from around 250,000 a year to around 750,000 a year. This would be done to eliminate the "family reunification" backlog. But a combination of other provisions--making family ties an item in the "points system" and establishing a new "hardship" category for family members--means that chain migration will not be reduced substantially, if at all, when the decade is over. After all, millions more legal immigrants, with the right to bring in family members, will then be living in the U.S.

The big picture here is a large surge in the number of legal immigrants at the same time as 12 to 20 million illegals are legalized--even though polls show clearly that most Americans think immigration levels are already too high.

FINE PRINT, BIG MESS

Most of this hocus-pocus is the work of Senator Kennedy's office, which is extraordinarily knowledgeable about immigration and has strong ties to the immigration bar. The White House has been cooperating with him throughout--the bill is really a Bush-Kennedy measure. To be sure, the Senate Republicans involved in the negotiations have won some concessions. But the complications and fine print of a 300-page bill mean that those concessions are less than they hoped for--and also that they don't always know what's in the bill. John McCain, who boasted of knowing more about the topic than anyone in the room during a well-publicized spat with Senator John Cornyn, was surprised (and upset) to discover that the White House had persuaded Kennedy to insert the tax amnesty. Republican senators were understandably expecting a rough reception from their constituents as they planned their departure for the Memorial Day weekend. It may well have been rougher than they expected. So why are they and the White House splitting the GOP over an avoidable controversy?

This is a real mystery. On almost every score the bill is damaging to Republican values and U.S. interests. Even those provisions that the Republicans wanted--for instance, the 400,000 guest workers--are blatant sops to specific business interests and party donors. They make the GOP look like a front for corporate America. Almost everything else is harmful at best and suicidal at worst.

There is no economic case for the bill. To repeat the essential economic facts about immigration: Its net impact on the living standards of native-born Americans is basically a wash. The National Academy of Sciences estimated that it amounted to between $1 billion and $10 billion in 1997--negligible sums in an economy worth about $8 trillion that year. The figures have changed since then, but not the proportion. What economic benefits of immigration there are go mainly to the immigrants themselves in the form of wages and salaries.

But that does not exhaust the economic argument. It is well known that immigration redistributes income from the poor to the rich as immigrants are willing to work for lower wages than native-born Americans. As a result, it reduces the incomes and job opportunities of blacks and other low-paid Americans. Three economists who specialize in the economics of immigration--George Borjas, Jeffrey Grogger, and Gordon Hanson--recently addressed the question of whether immigration has any relationship with the relatively high imprisonment rates for black Americans in a paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research. They concluded: "The 1980-2000 immigrant influx . . . generally 'explains' about 20 to 60 percent of the decline in wages, 25 percent of the decline in employment, and about 10 percent of the rise in incarceration rates among blacks with a high-school education or less." (They found similar but lesser effects for low-paid white Americans.)

If immigration is a wash from a narrow economic standpoint, it is a serious problem from a larger social one--and a disaster in fiscal terms. Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation--whose previous estimates of such fiscal costs have easily survived White House attacks--now predicts that the new bill will rack up $2.4 trillion in total net government costs. That is almost equal to the cost of the entire annual federal budget. He calculates as follows: "Receiving, on average, $19,588 more in immediate benefits than they pay in taxes each year, low-skill immigrant households impose substantial long-term costs on the U.S. taxpayer. Assuming an average 60-year adult life span for heads of household, the average lifetime costs to the taxpayer will be nearly $1.2 million for each low-skill household, net of any taxes paid."

That does not end the matter, of course. Though the immigrants benefiting from the bill are disproportionately poor and unskilled, others might be of greater help to the U.S. Treasury. On the other side of the ledger, however, our estimate of the number of illegals likely to benefit from the bill may be far too low. The 1986 amnesty was expected to cover only 1 million people; in the event, 3 million people received it. So even if some of Rector's specific estimates turn out to be wrong, his conclusion that this bill is the biggest expansion of the welfare state in history is likely to prove spot-on.

NAKED POLITICS

Obviously the Democrats like this sort of thing. The expansion of the welfare-receiving classes--in addition to being a good thing in itself, in their view--will expand the constituencies for the big government and "compassionate spending" that they want. Indeed they are distinctly clear-eyed about the drawbacks and benefits to them of immigration. Rep. Barney Frank candidly admitted that higher immigration was damaging to the interests of the bluecollar workers he claims to represent. But he went on to explain his support for it on the grounds that, since the immigrants would vote overwhelmingly for Democrats, the blue-collar workers would benefit in the end.

If that is so, why would any Republican support the bill? Two reasons in one seem to be the ultimate explanation: George Bush wants a legacy--and he believes that an immigration reform bringing a shift of Hispanic support to the GOP would give him one. It is humanly understandable that the president should nourish even such unrealistic hopes. But it is staggering that any other Republican should believe them.

Hispanics regularly divide roughly two to one for the Democrats in elections--sometimes the split is bigger, sometimes smaller--but they never give Republicans majority support. That substantial minority of Hispanics which leans Republican is relatively uninterested in immigration; more broadly, it is attempting to emancipate itself from purely ethnic loyalties in its movement toward Americanism and the GOP. The Hispanics who will be legalized--and eventually perhaps "citizenized"--by the Senate bill are disproportionately poor and thus, as Barney Frank realizes, natural Democrat material. If they were to break according to the two-to-one lines of the entire Hispanic community, that would mean a net gain of between 4 and 7 million votes for the Democrats nationally. Those Republicans supporting this measure are committing slow suicide on behalf of a president who has done them and the GOP very few favors. As the French general said of the charge of the Light Brigade: C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre.

A final argument mounted by advocates of the bill is that, whatever its flaws, it is still an improvement on the status quo in which 12 to 20 million illegal immigrants live in the shadows of our society. This argument seems to have impressed some conservatives. It shouldn't.

To begin with, the status quo is not some unalterable reality handed down by Providence. It is the result of, inter alia, quite deliberate government policy. Some elements of that policy can be changed only by legislation--for instance, switching from an immigration policy based on family reunification to one rooted in job skills--and can therefore be introduced in current circumstances only with Democratic support. Most legislative reforms, however, are changes that the Democrats want. Hence the strong bias in the bill toward policies favored by Ted Kennedy, the Democrats, and immigration lawyers.

What the GOP wants (or should want) is stronger border security, tougher workplace enforcement, and more money for both. All these things are supposed to be already available under current law. It is the Bush administration's failure to enforce these laws systematically that has created a status quo supposedly worse than the Senate bill. If those Democrats who want to impeach President Bush had a sense of humor, they would cite his immigration record at the head of the indictment. At the very least it would embarrass Republicans--and it might prompt Bush to improve the status quo.

As long as the president fails to enforce the law, however, he can hardly cite his own failure as a reason for bringing in something new. Even without improvement, however, is the status quo really worse than the bill? After all, the bill would confirm the status quo in its main aspect--the millions who arrived here illegally would remain. But they would now enjoy a variety of additional rights, from voting to welfare, and, for that reason, impose a variety of costs on the American taxpayer. More than $2 trillion is a high price for Americans to pay just to bring intruders out of the shadows. And the revelation that official America is willing to pay such large sums--and to undermine the rule of law as well--in order to avoid any appearance of hardheartedness would amount to inviting another 12 million illegals to join the aliens already here. We would soon be back where we started.

In short the status quo is actually better than the Senate bill. It's as bad as that.