Overrun with new "citizens": if the Bush-Kennedy immigration plan in the Senate is enacted, the United States could be flooded with more than 200 million new legal immigrants in the next 20 years!

The first part of President Bush's televised May 15 immigration speech was carefully crafted to appease his conservative base, which he has alienated with his open-borders policies. Hence, the address was front-loaded with references to sovereignty and security and promises to beef up border enforcement with more Border Patrol agents and a temporary deployment of National Guard units. The back end of the address was a salvo aimed at prodding Congress to adopt his proposals of amnesty for millions of illegal aliens already here as well as a continuous flow of foreign "guest workers."

Millions of viewers watched President Bush's speech. Many of them, no doubt, focused on the front end (as the speech writers had planned) and came away optimistically hopeful that the president had gotten the message and was finally getting serious about our border crisis. How ever, on the same day as President Bush's speech, Republican Senator Jeff Sessions released an impact analysis of the Senate immigration bill--which President Bush supports--that will shock and dismay any who are putting hope for sane immigration policy in proposals coming from the White House or the Senate leadership.

Reality Check

The numbers are staggering and mind-numbing. According to the detailed analysis by Sen. Sessions and his staff, if the Senate bill is allowed to pass, we could expect to see up to 217 million legal immigrants enter the United States over the next 20 years! Have the president or the Senate leaders in either party given the American people even the slightest hint that this immigration tsunami is hidden within the fine print of the 614-page bill? Of course not; that would be political suicide for any politician supporting the bill. But enacting the bill into law would amount to national suicide, as no nation has ever, or could ever, survive such an immigration onslaught.

As Senator Sessions points out, the bill "allows at least 6.5 million, and up to 60.7 million new guest workers to come to the United States over the next 20 years. There is nothing 'temporary' about these workers. Employers may file a green card application on their behalf as soon as they arrive in the United States, or the worker may self-petition for a green card after four years of work." The bill would also allow "at least 7.8 million, and up to 72.8 million immediate family members of low-skilled workers to come to the United States over the next 20 years."

Furthermore, the Senate bill dramatically multiplies the number of H-1B visas for skilled workers by increasing the annual cap of 65,000 to 115,000, and by automatically increasing the new cap by 20 percent each year the cap is hit. In addition, it creates a new exemption to the cap for anyone who has an "advanced degree in science, technology, engineering, or math." In other words, unlimited visas for everyone with real or fake degrees from any foreign university.

Unfortunately, bad as the provisions cited above are, they do not even begin to tell the whole story. The Sessions analysis lists a number of other provisions that would add millions more to the immigration tidal wave. And these numbers do not even include what is commonly referred to as "chain migration," which occurs when an immigrant becomes a citizen. Citizens have a legal right to bring in family members other than spouses and children. They can bring in their parents, their adult siblings, and the spouses and children of their adult siblings, causing exponential immigration growth.

It Gets Worse

Even the above astounding numbers do not tell the whole bitter truth, however, since they do not include illegal migration. With our legal immigration process already in a shambles and backlogged for years, this new tsunami will encourage additional millions--and tens of millions--to take advantage of the chaos to enter the United States illegally.

In August of last year, the Pew Hispanic Center released the results of a national survey it had conducted in Mexico showing that 46 percent of Mexicans indicated they would move to the United States if they had the opportunity and the means. What does that mean in real numbers? Mexico is the twelfth largest nation in the world by population: 107 million. Forty-six percent of that total is around 50 million. It is probably no exaggeration to suggest that the United States is a similarly desirable destination for a similar percentage of all of the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean, which have a combined population of 530 million. That could translate into a couple hundred million people headed northward to crash our besieged border.

If American voters learn about these hidden deadly traps in the Senate bill, they will surely loose a roar of outrage that will send its sponsoring politicians scurrying for cover. And it is not too much to hope that they also will wreak havoc on the perpetrators at the ballot box in November.