[OESY]

Good post, Carlo, nicely sprinkled with memorable quotations.

It's either the Bush Plan, or Do Nothing. As we begin to build a front-end database of arriving visitors, we have to clean up the back end -- the 8-10 million already here, who made it in -- the vast majority of whom are good contributing people.

A program should not condone or encourage illegal entry, but no one will pay for the billions it would take to enforce a non-voluntary plan. So you need a program of incentives, and the best incentive is to legitimatize their existence because we aren't going to deport them.

Pardon my mixed metaphor, but where the rest of the world has a brain drain, we are the magnet that attracts them. The benefits are ours. We depend on their labor, their ambition to make it, their contribution to the economy and, yes, their taxes to fund our the government, including our fight against terror, social security and the rest. Beyond that, we depend on them to fashion their ideas into products, start new companies with their savings, and hire Americans as we saw so abundantly during the technology boom which is now experiencing a revival.

Bush presented a well-thought out incentive program that will help us get a handle on uncontrolled immigration and potential terrorists within our borders. It recognizes reality and has political side benefits.

[NittanyLion]

It's either the Bush Plan, or Do Nothing.

False choice. There's any number of additional alternatives that could be adopted. Surely you know that...

[Publius6961]

It's either the Bush Plan, or Do Nothing.
BS.
I love the way you think. Euthenize the patient, or send him home. Brilliant!

...but no one will pay for the billions it would take to enforce a non-voluntary plan.
BS redux.
I would rather spend billions deporting these losers over and over than billions on rewarding them.