What the President should say about immigration but won't - Part 2 - Quality

Reform bill to double immigration�-�Nation/Politics�-�The Washington Times, America's Newspaper:
"The immigration reform bill that the Senate takes up today would more than double the flow of legal immigration into the United States each year and dramatically lower the skill level of those immigrants.
"The number of extended family members that U.S. citizens or legal residents can bring into this country would double. More dramatically, the number of workers and their immediate families could increase sevenfold if there are enough U.S. employers looking for cheap foreign labor. Another provision would grant humanitarian visas to any woman or orphaned child anywhere in the world 'at risk of harm' because of age or sex."

Here is a great example of the legislative process in action. The way you put together a winning coalition is to take a bad idea from one senator and combine it with another bad idea from another senator and so on. When you have enough bad ideas in the package that at least 51 senators each like at least one of them - VOILA! - you have an abomination like the Hagel-Martinez bill that meets the needs of senators by ignoring the wishes of the public.

Anybody who doesn't believe that we need to raise the levels of job skills and educational attainment of immigrants rather than lowering them is no friend of the United States.

Likewise, anyone who hasn't noticed the abuses of the family reunification rules in our present system - principally the finessing of the requirement that family members already here be responsible for the economic support of those they sponsor and not let them become a charge on the public purse - has not been paying attention and has no business crafting public policy.

Finally, the idea that the US ought to be responsible for every woman or orphan in the world is just plain crazy.

Of course, the President will not say anything against Hagel-Martinez because his goal is to add his own bad ideas - amnesty in particular - to whatever bill comes through the Senate and he will need their votes.