Illegal Immigration Article Roundup

The Senate passed its unbelievably ridiculous bill today - during Mexican President Vicente Fox's visit to California - proving beyond any doubt how out-of-touch this body is with the American public. Only the House of Representatives stands between us and our continued - possibly accelerated - spiral down into oblivion.

For the life of me I cannot understand how so many Republicans could possibly vote for such an asinine piece of legislation.

Republicans have had control of both houses of Congress since 1994, and the Executive branch since 2000. Yet liberal legislation like this nonsense continues to get passed. Who is voting for these people? BOTH senators from Alaska voted YES. John McCain teams up with TED KENNEDY?? What is the world coming to?

One of the humdingers in this legislation include a provision that Republican Arlen Specter allowed in, which says the U.S. must consult with Mexico before building any kind of barrier at the border. It's this kind of un-serious legislation that will doom our country. Either terrorists will waltz through the border and start blowing up random shopping malls, or 15 million poor illegal Mexican immigrants will get amnesty (or continued lack of enforcement - same thing), have "anchor" children here, bringing more relatives and much larger families in with them, while sending billions of American dollars south to support Mexico's economy. All while continuing to turn the United States into a third-world country.

Michelle Malkin has a nice roundup of comments on the bill here and the "consultation" language here.

Charles Krauthammer, excellent as always:

...is it just conservatives who think the United States ought not be gratuitously squandering one of its greatest assets — its magnetic attraction to would-be immigrants around the world? There are tens of millions of people who want to leave their homes and come to America. We essentially have an NFL draft in which the United States has the first, oh, million or so draft picks. Rather than exercising those picks, i.e., choosing by whatever criteria we want — such as education, enterprise, technical skills and creativity — we admit the tiniest fraction of the best and brightest and permit millions of the unskilled to pour in instead.

South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint has a great "Top 10 Reasons to Oppose the Senate Amnesty Bill" list on his website.

ExposeTheLeft.com has audio and a transcript of a brilliant debate between Rush Limbaugh and Tony Snow, now the White House spokesman, on the bill.

The Washington Times ran an article on the bill's passage:

The leaders of both parties hailed the 62-36 passage as a historic success. Majority Leader Bill Frist said the vote represented the "very best" of the Senate.
"This is a success for the American people," the Tennessee Republican said. "It is a success for people who hope to participate someday in that American dream."

One wonders what could be further from the truth, or just how much worse of a Majority Leader we could possibly get in the Senate. Frist has been spineless every single day he's held that title.

And Mark Steyn, always good, writes about the Senate wanting to give illegal immigrants social security benefits for the work they did while illegal (i.e. using fraudulent social security documents). On John McCain's complaint on the Senate floor about his colleagues continuing to refer to his bill's provisions as "amnesty", Steyn made this brilliant observation:

"Call it a banana if you want to," he told his fellow world's greatest deliberators. "To call the process that we require under this legislation amnesty frankly distorts the debate and it's an unfair interpretation of it."

He has a point. Technically, an "amnesty" only involves pardoning a person for a crime rather than, as this moderate compromise legislation does, pardoning him for a crime and also giving him a cash bonus for committing it. In fact, having skimmed my Webster's, I can't seem to find a word that does cover what the Senate is proposing, it having never previously occurred to any other society in the course of human history.

I'm giving myself a headache. I'm going to bed. More this weekend. It's MEMORIAL DAY! PUT UP YOUR FLAG!