And nobody claimed that it didn't. That's my whole point. People here tend to read what they want into this whole bill, just like they do CFR, etc. They only see what they want to see. It takes a whole lot of time and effort to actually read the whole bill to find all the small print and digest it. I'm still in the process of doing that. Yet there are people here who are ready to jump on Robert Byrd's back like a bunch of sheeple when he did nothing to stop the last president with getting away with lying under oath, obstructing justice, etc.
It's really kind of funny.
Quit trying to call everyone members of the Robert Byrd fan club. The people on this thread were up in arms about this last week when it was on the floor of the House - before old Byrd had said anything about.
And, I'm sorry, but if you are diligently reading the whole bill (H.R.1885) to get to the bottom of this, then you are going to completely miss the point. In fact, you'll almost certainly conclude that H.R.1885 is an overall fine bill with one or two bad points, like 245i. That is because the overall bill was a trojan horse used to push 245i. All the good border control stuff in 1885 had already passsed as H.R.3525 and was sitting in the Senate (on hold courtesy of Byrd). At Bush's insistence, the House leadership reintroduced 3525 with one thing added - 245i - as H.R.1885 and called for a voice vote approving the great Border Security bill. Everything besides 245i has ALREADY passed the House, and will hopefully become law.
Although some people throw words around, this is not a "mass amnesty". Nor does it make people citizens automatically, or even give them green cards automatically. But it does forgive their illegal status in the country, and allows them to avoid the full background check they would go through if they were coming legally from their home country. The law normally says that if you were here illegally (you snuck in, your tourist visa expired and you did not leave, etc.), then you cannot 'get legal' without going back to your country and getting a proper approval to enter legally. Very often people who are currently here illegally might be eligble, if they applied, for a green card. But, they have to go back home and get screened in their home country before re-entering legally - and they may be penalized for having been in the US illegally by having to wait as long as 10 years (in the worst cases). This penalty is well known to 'customers' of the INS, and is there as a deterrent to ignoring our immigration laws. Heck, its not even jail time or a fine or anything - its inelegibilty to come in because you broke the rules last time.
245i waives the penalty and the requirement to return to the home country before getting the green card (assuming the person qualified), in exchange for a $1000 fee. This is an "amnesty", because it erases the penalty for breaking the law. This specific amnesty is relatively narrowly defined so as to affect somewhere between 200k-600k people from countries all over the world. It is bad for three reasons:
1. It is a terrorism risk because people don't have to get a background check before they get the green card, as they normally would (even though they already broke law!).2. It clearly signals that people who stay here illegally can eventually expect an amnesty of one kind or another. Behind this one provision is a larger history of small "administative" or "political" amnesties that congress passes from time to time. This is just one. It basically makes the whole of immigration law not credible.
3. It essentially penalizes people who went the legal route, by letting people who broke the rules to jump to the front of the line. Assume Algerian A is waiting two years for a green card and making $2.00 per day. Algerian B gets into the US illegally and gets a job making $80.00 a day. After two years 245i happens and he can apply for a green card and stay in the US all the while. He is now completely legal, just like Algerian A. But in that two year interval, Algerian A lived in a third-world country and made ~$1040, while Algerian B lived in the wonderful US of A and made ~$41,600. Taking the economic rationalist point of view, no rational person would obey US immigration laws. This is exactly why the system is so screwed up.
If you are lookng for a clear understanding, you might be helped by information available at http://www.numbersusa.com, http://www.fairus.org, or http://www.house.gov/tancredo/.