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Here we go yet again on this subject.

"After the White House news conference this morning, Bill Kristol on Fox News praised President Bush's remarks about "immigration reform" as "eloquent." Beg to differ. The president's open-borders statements were empty, garish platitudes strung together sloppily like cheap Christmas lights:"

A guest worker program that matches workers to employers only after those employers have made every reasonable attempt to find an American employee first is no an open-borders policy. When an author starts her article by purposely misrepresenting the subject of his article in the first paragraph, the rest should be treated with the proper amount of skepticism.

"Illegal aliens "do the job Americans won't do." President Bush used that dog-tired phrase about a half-dozen times during today's press conference as he defended his impending illegal alien amnesty plan. Mark Krikorian effectively puts this mindless rhetoric to rest here."

Read the article. It would be correct except for one point. The US economy isn't a closed system in and of itself. It's part of a world market.

If you remove the immigrant workers, then wages rise to the point that available workers are willing to work at that particular job, or to the point where it becomes economically feasible to create automated systems to make up for the lack of workers.

That much is completely reasonable.

The problem that Mark Krikorian ignores is that in order to pay those workers more or develop new technology the companies have to significantly raise prices. You don't have the flexibility to raise prices significantly in a competitive market, and our markets are increasingly seeing greater competition from foreign sources.

When the companies labor costs get to high, they can't just charge more in such a market, they simply go out of business, and all the employees at that company lose their jobs.

""Family values don't stop at the Rio Grande." Uh huh. Well, terrorists and gang members and drunken murderers and cop-killers don't stop there either. And based on past and recent experience, granting amnesty to 13 million law-breakers will only result in more illegal immigration, not less."

Maybe Michelle Malkin should try actually reading Bush's plan. It doesn't grant Amnesty to 13 million illegal immigrants.

It requires people who want to stay in the US to apply for the guest worker program. They'll go through background checks and have to be matched with a job or they will be deported. After the plan gets up and running, immigrants would have to apply for the program from outside the US. Only those that apply when the program begins can apply from within the US which does grant those a form of amnesty for their violation of immigration laws.

I won't disagree that sitting around and talking about starting this program in the near future does encourage illegal immigration to some extent.

However, the limited amnesty part of the program does provide an advantage in that it encourages immigrants currently in the US to apply and become legal rather than continuing to work illegally. It helps reduce to huge problem of dealing with the number of illegal immigrants we need to find and deport.

Bush's plan does have it's problems. It's biggest problem is that it's concentrating too much on reforming legal immigration (which I don't see as a bad thing) and far to little on enforcement of the immigration laws.

It does have provisions that will help with enforcement, but with the small amounts of detail given in the plan they definitely appear far too weak to address the problem.

I think the vast majority of people in the US recognize that illegal immigrants are a huge problem in the US right now. I just wish that people would quit accusing Bush of doing things he's not. We need to concentrate on pushing for better enforcement of immigration laws, however squabbling about things that bush isn't suggesting doesn't help move things forward. It just leads to more years of stagnation on immigration reform which we really can't afford.

They'll go through background checks and have to be matched with a job or they will be deported.

ROTFLOL!!!

Thanks..great laugh. Always enjoy a humorous post.

Read the article. It would be correct except for one point. The US economy isn't a closed system in and of itself. It's part of a world market. If you remove the immigrant workers, then wages rise to the point that available workers are willing to work at that particular job, or to the point where it becomes economically feasible to create automated systems to make up for the lack of workers. That much is completely reasonable.

Do you think the chinese out to be able to sell pirated DVDs of music, movies in the US? I'm sure they'd be cheaper.