Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader is not a fan of the Patriot Act as long-time readers know. His opposition to the Patriot Act is based largely in the fact that it was hardly debated and rushed through Congress to President Bush’s desk. While many provisions of the Patriot Act are fine, there are many others that just have not been well thought out.

As a matter of course, your Maximum Leader would prefer the status quo to change. (Isn’t that the heart of conservatism?) In the case of far reaching legislation, he feels that “rushing a deal through” means that the law will be a bad one.

And so he comes to the new Immigration Bill before the Congress…

Your Maximum Leader has tried to read the bill. (Which the Heritage Foundation has graciously posted.) He really has. He’s gotten pretty far along, but hasn’t finished the job. Allow him to say… The bill is a mess. One can tell that this is the worst kind of political compromise. He says the worst kind of political compromise because it seems just thrown together. It is like some of the negotiating entities (presumably various Senators and Administration officials) just started throwing things in that everyone seemed to agree on.

All in all this bill would need months of work and careful review to be made more thoughtful and workable. But, we live in an age where careful thought and consideration to the bill will not be given in the first place. And it now appears as though the Senate and the White House are hell-bent for leather to pass this bill in more or less its current form.

So, your Maximum Leader has to oppose its passage. He would prefer that no immigration “reform” bill be passed than to pass a bill that no one understands, or will have time to attempt to understand.

Your Maximum Leader sees that many of his own fellow-travelers are opposed to the bill for various reasons. They might oppose family reunification. They might oppose the proposed “point system” used in evaluating visa status. They might oppose that the border will not be fortified. These are all legitimate reasons to oppose the bill. On the other side, many liberals and Democrats are opposed to the bill because it does strengthen the border. They oppose the bill because it requires fines to be paid by illegals wanting to change their status. They oppose the bill because it doesn’t go “far enough” for them.

Whatever the reasons for opposition, they are all legitimate concerns. Your Maximum Leader will continue to make his standard points on this issue…

1) Until we can secure our borders (Canada included) none of this matters at all. And by securing our borders your Maximum Leader means that we have a comprehensive and workable strategy to detect and indentify people crossing into and out of the United States. He doesn’t anticipate that securing the borders will “get” everyone trying to enter the US. But it needs to get “most” of the people trying to enter the US. He isn’t sure what percentage constitutes “most” of the people. But he feels it ought to be a pretty high number.

Excursus - As we now know, thanks to lawyer with TB, our existing lax system doesn’t even work that well. Really now… If you are on a list to be detained and you reach the border and you are not detained… Due to human error or any other error… That is a big problem.

2) Once we secure our borders, then we can discuss what type of immigration reform we want. As your Maximum Leader has said before, after the borders are secured, he doesn’t care much what status we give to illegal immigrants. He imagines that if many of the current illegals were given some status where they could work in the US and travel to and fro to Mexico they might take that status.

We all reap tremendous benefits (and do pay significant costs) from the work of illegal immigrants. The US is a nation of opportunity. We can’t and shouldn’t bolt the doors and refuse to let more people in. Your Maximum Leader believes that we ought to raise our current levels of legal immigration. He remembers reading that there are only 18,000 H1B visas issued now. These visas are for highly trained and educated people who have tremendous skills (generally engineers, doctors, scientists). He was shocked to learn the number was that low. He would raise it to 100,000 a year. We need these people to build our economy and future. But we also need the low skill workers. Your Maximum Leader would like to see a floating number of temporary worker visas available. The number would be based on the number of jobs we project to be available. These people would be allowed to come to the US and work and then free to leave, and come back.

We need to give some serious thought as to how we want the path to citizenship to look. We also need to give serious thought to what it means to be a citizen of our nation. Just as we aren’t thinking about a true immigration reform package, we aren’t thinking about any of this right now…

Your Maximum Leader believes that the current immigration bill will likely pass the Congress and be signed by the President in more or less its current form. And that is a bad thing… Your Maximum Leader will write his two Senators and ask them to vote against the bill - or at least demand that more time is given to debate the bill. There is no reason to rush this.

Do you know who has some interesting thoughts on the immigration bill and how the President is acting… Peggy Noonan… You ought to read her piece on Opinion Journal about how George W. Bush is destroying the Republican base. She makes a very interesting observation:

One of the things I have come to think the past few years is that the Bushes, father and son, though different in many ways, are great wasters of political inheritance. They throw it away as if they’d earned it and could do with it what they liked. Bush senior inherited a vibrant country and a party at peace with itself. He won the leadership of a party that had finally, at great cost, by 1980, fought itself through to unity and come together on shared principles. Mr. Bush won in 1988 by saying he would govern as Reagan had. Yet he did not understand he’d been elected to Reagan’s third term. He thought he’d been elected because they liked him. And so he raised taxes, sundered a hard-won coalition, and found himself shocked to lose his party the presidency, and for eight long and consequential years. He had many virtues, but he wasted his inheritance.

Bush the younger came forward, presented himself as a conservative, garnered all the frustrated hopes of his party, turned them into victory, and not nine months later was handed a historical trauma that left his country rallied around him, lifting him, and his party bonded to him. He was disciplined and often daring, but in time he sundered the party that rallied to him, and broke his coalition into pieces. He threw away his inheritance. I do not understand such squandering.

Very interesting indeed.

Oppose the immigration bill… No bill is better than a bad bill…

Carry on.