Immigration on the ropes

Robert Paer and Michael Luo give the lowdown on the immigration bill:

The outlook for the bill is uncertain. President Bush strongly supports the measure, which incorporates many of his ideas. In the House, Democratic leaders say the president will have to deliver dozens of Republican votes that would be needed for passage.

Some senators who voted to take up the legislation said they did not support the bill in its current form but hoped to improve it with amendments.

The measure, as it now stands, would offer legal status to most of the 12 million illegal immigrants, strengthen security at the border and increase penalties for employers of illegal immigrants.

Democrats plan to offer amendments to eliminate or scale back provisions under which hundreds of thousands of temporary foreign workers would be admitted to the United States each year.

Critics contend that this program would create an underclass of immigrant workers who could adversely affect the wages and working conditions of Americans in some industries.

And that doesn't even account for the sorts of wacky amendments that the rightmost flank of the senate would like to see adopted before they'll vote for it. Needless to say, if the 110th Congress represents the narrow window through which any immigration reform can pass, well then things don't really look so very good right now. Meanwhile, David Brooks tries to whiddle things down to Friedmanian levels of simplicity:

The United States is the Harvard of the world. Millions long to get in. Yet has this country set up an admissions system that encourages hard work, responsibility and competition? No. Under our current immigration system, most people get into the U.S. through criminality, nepotism or luck. The current system does almost nothing to encourage good behavior or maximize the nation’s supply of human capital.

I don't think the "America as Harvard" comparison quite captures the much more complicated matrix of reasons that poor immigrants want to live in America; that many Americans have wildly divergent concerns about their arrival; and that because of those concerns, politicians are unable to arrive at an immigration policy that fairly balances the economic and moral tensions inherent to our immigration system. Not that I doubt that David Brooks sees America as the uncomplicated, and mostly morally pristine nation-version of the world's finest university. He's just wrong!

The rest of the op-ed, it should be said, is a lukewarm defense of the bill, which I mostly disagree with, but which offers a more nuanced analysis of the good things about the "compromise".