Immigration Update

Barring a major turn of events, it looks like the President will get his wish: Congress will pass comprehensive immigration reform. Here's a look at the legislation's progress as reported by the AP's David Espo :
For all the controversy, immigration legislation is moving steadily through the Senate, shielded by a bipartisan coalition durable enough to defeat crippling amendments, shake off political warning shots and even recover from an occasional stumble. Critics concede as much. Asked on Friday whether the bill was headed for passage, Sen. Jeff Sessions, (R-AL), replied without hesitation: "I think it is."
Sen. Sessions is one of the heroes in this debate after submitting an amendment to the bill to build 370 miles of triple-layered border fencing and another 500 miles of vehicle barriers. The early predictions were that that didn't have a shot at passing. Those predictions turned out wrong, with the Sessions Amendment passing 83-16 .

The border hawks won won a key victory in their fight. They can now credibly face their constituents and say that they got serious about border security.

I suspect that another key part of the President's speech, harsh penalties for employers who hire large amounts of illegal immigrants, will pass, too. As King Banaian noted today on this afternoon's NARN program today, this is an important internal security component. I totally concur.



Posted Saturday, May 20, 2006 4:44 PM

Comment 1 by kb at 20-May-06 06:39 PM
I believe, in fact, that the more effective deterrent to illegal immigration would be to place relatively more dollars in the program of internal enforcements and relatively less on border patrol. I question how effective a fence would be given we have increased the number of hours devoted by border patrol to the linewatch by a factor of four over the last twenty years, but have gotten only about a small decrease in illegal immigration. Now, if someone wants to argue for fences to release BP to engage in internal enforcement, that's an argument well worth having -- that could be right.

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