That corporate contributors to the election and reelection of the President, and the RNC and Republican Senate Campaigns, have so ensconced their position, to the exclusion of normal, flyover country guys and gals like you and I in the grassroots. Their money--combined with their open door lobbying to the Oval Office--essentially has bought off national policy, for they want massive numbers of illegals at cheap wages with erased national borders to be "globally competitive", damn the borders in the process--and they were willing to pay, donate and influence to that effect.
I cannot believe that naive, benevolent altruism is entirely to blame for this travesty.
I agree. I think that is the weakest explanation offered, and probably is a figleaf for the mercantile interests you describe. That Bush may have deceived himself into believing it, however, is not ruled out.
I think President Bush is worried about how he’ll be treated in the history books. He assumes, probably correctly, that future history books will be written by leftists (as they mostly are now) and that he’ll be trashed in them, particularly for the Iraq War. So he needs something to make him popular with the elite crowd.
Take LBJ as an example. He gets trashed in the history texts for Vietnam, but it’s more than balanced by the praise which befalls him for enacting the Great Society, three major “civil rights” bills, and the 1965 immigration bill.
Bush figures he’ll be treated like dirt by future historians for Iraq and for his conservative court appointments. He’s done a few things to appeal to the left, such as the No Child Left Behind debacle and the prescription drug entitlement. But those positives (from the “liberal” point of view) aren’t nearly of the magnitude of the bills LBJ got enacted, which included not only the ones I’ve already cited, but bills to provide federal arts funding, federal TV & radio channels (PBS & NPR), and more.
Bush desperately needed a big, bloated, proposal which would stick it to middle America and pander to elite opinion in a major way, an unforgettable way that cultural elites would still be celebrating decades or even centuries later. The Bush-Kennedy immigration bill would do that. It would doom America to eventually become a third world nation and would set the GOP on a path to extinction. That would indeed be something that future leftist historians would praise to the heavens, perhaps even eclipsing their hatred for Bush based on other issues.