What You Need To Know About the Immigration Bill

In this morning's WaPo, Robert Samuelson explains some things the Senate didn't tell you about its recently passed immigration bill:

The Senate passed legislation last week that Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) hailed as "the most far-reaching immigration reform in our history." You might think that the first question anyone would ask is how much it would actually increase or decrease legal immigration. But no. After the Senate approved the bill by 62 to 36, you could not find the answer in the news columns of The Post, the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. Yet the estimates do exist and are fairly startling. By rough projections, the Senate bill would double the legal immigration that would occur during the next two decades from about 20 million (under present law) to about 40 million.

One job of journalism is to inform the public about what our political leaders are doing. In this case, we failed. The Senate bill's sponsors didn't publicize its full impact on legal immigration, and we didn't fill the void. It's safe to say that few Americans know what the bill would do because no one has told them. Indeed, I suspect that many senators who voted for the legislation don't have a clue as to the potential overall increase in immigration

I am a moderate on this issue and do believe that the immigrants already here contribute more than they consume, but there is no way on earth that this country can assimilate 40 million people in 20 years. We need to gain control of the borders before we do anything else. The compromise bill should contain as little as possible of the Senate's concilliatory gestures toward legal and illegal aliens.

Monk