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The difference is, when their visas run out, they would have to leave at their own expense. While they are here, they will be accountable for their whereabouts, they pay taxes, support four economy and pay their own way.

What a radical concept!

The difference is, when their visas run out, they would have to leave at their own expense.

I'm no radical on this. If this is what the President wants, and Congress really puts in place a legal infrastructure to insure that most of today's illegals gradually go home, I'm for it. I just think that our role on FR should be to hold Mr. Bush to the fire, either by reminding people of the good (if insincere) details in his speech, as I do, or by just showing our displeasure with tolerance of lawbreakers, as other will do.

I've read a lot of articles on the President's plan, but I think this one, by National Interest editor John O'Sullivan, best explains the problem Bush's reckless plan presents us:

Not to put too fine a point on it, Mr. Bush is proposing to abolish the U.S. labor market by integrating it with the world labor market — including the third-world labor market. . . .

the Bush people argue that immigrants, including illegals currently here, will be allowed to take only those jobs that Americans have already turned down. But how will this prohibition be enforced? Very simply: It is not going to be enforced — at least for the illegals already here. The "senior administration official" who briefed the press on the Bush proposals stated clearly that the mere fact that an illegal immigrant was employed would be sufficient proof that no American had wanted the job.

Hard to believe? Here is the money quote: "If you're asking the question as to whether the person [the employer] needs to say, okay, well, here's Mary, and she's in this spot, do we need to hold on Mary and look for some American to fill that position, the answer is, no. We assume that by virtue of Mary's employment, that marketplace test, if you will, has been met." Several other statements to the same effect — and the senior administration official advanced no clear idea of how the government would ensure that the prohibition would be enforced for new arrivals.

The administration's next line of defense is to argue that the immigrants will be temporary guest workers who will return home after three years. Yet almost all experience with such programs in several continents across several decades demonstrates that guest workers become permanent residents in due course — very often as a result of the kind of "amnesty" that the administration is again proposing here.

But we need not rely on past experience to forecast their permanence. Guest workers will be here indefinitely because (a) under the Bush rules there is no limit to the number of times their three-year work program can be extended; (b) they can bring in their families and, if they have a child while here, they become the parents of a U.S. citizen and thus undeportable; (c) they will have greater opportunities to marry U.S. citizens; and (d) if all else fails, they can blend back into the underworld of illegal work and documentation that more than eight million of them already inhabit.

In response to this last point, Bush-administration officials assure us that, on the contrary, they will deport those guest workers who fail to leave the U.S. voluntarily when their work program is finished. But this assurance is in flat contradiction to their main rationale for the entire reform program — namely, that the alternative policy of deporting the eight million illegals here now is unthinkable.

If it is unthinkable to deport eight million illegals today, why will it be easier to deport two or three times that number in a decade or so when even more businesses will be alleged to be reliant on them and even more pressure groups will be pressing their case?