The Senate’s bill is not amnesty. Amnesty is a pardon. The Senate bill goes beyond forgiveness. It grants rewards. As Mark Steyn says:

The undocumented guys only have to pay taxes for any three out of the last five years? How come Americans can’t get a deal like that? Meanwhile, any attempt to enforce the border requires “consultation” with Mexico. Vicente Fox has just got his own permanent Security Council veto in the Department of Homeland Security.

I think it’s very hard for conservatives to support a Congress that would pass such a bill. Aside from the entitlement explosion and the national security issues, this bill is a cynical corruption of the integrity of US sovereignty and citizenship.

And he says it so well.

This bill is no compromise. It obviously satisfies and locks into precedent virtually all pro-immigrant desires. It will retroactively legalize what has been illegal since the last amnesty. It will immediately add ten million new residents to the “official” rolls, a number that will probably double or quadruple before the next amnesty. It offers a shortcut to citizenship for most of these new residents.

We now need another name for “legal aliens”, one that hasn’t lost its meaning.

The parts that appeal to the anti-immigrants are modest in scale and emminently defundable once the media spotlight moves on.

A compromise along similar lines from my point of view would be: a coast-to-coast fence, internal enforcement, deportation, anchor babies back on the boat and shipped home free of charge. Oh and you can have a limited form of your guest worker program, subject to financial circumstances of course. Ahem.

It’s embarassing to be so greedy in what is supposed to be a “compromise” but that’s what the Senate bill is like, just skewed the opposite way.

Whether this bill dies in commitee or gets a few bits lopped off before passage, the damage is done. The carrot is being shaken within easy grasp for millions waiting beyond US borders, and it’s obvious there isn’t much of a stick for those who ignore the rules.