Why the Immigration Bill Died (Again)

The post mortem on the immigration bill continues, and while the pundits are invariably looking at why a bipartisan effort by Congress and the President failed to get the bill passed, they all overlook one basic fact.

Americans have a soft spot for immigrants who have jumped through all the hoops that we call for in order to become a US citizen. As we approach the Fourth of July, we will be treated to stories from around the country about swearing in ceremonies of legal immigrants who decided to become citizens. We will hear about all the hardships they underwent in their former countries and what they had to do to come to the US.

It will tug at the heartstrings. It will get emotional for some.

And it is in those media spots will you realize why the immigration bill died.

People have no problem with folks coming to the US from around the world to want a better way of life. We just want to see it done legally. Giving illegal aliens a way to short circuit that approach goes beyond distasteful for most Americans (the ones that aren't in the open borders, pro-illegal alien crowd). Why give illegal aliens an easy way out when we demand so much of those seeking to become citizens of the US.

You can argue, like Fred Barnes does, that it took the right wing of the GOP to light a fire that spread to the rest of the electorate, but that was because no one else was looking too closely at what the bill actually said. It was folks like Michelle Malkin and others who ripped the bill apart to find out precisely what was being offered, and came to the conclusion that it was amnesty for illegal aliens. Even the President had a Freudian slip where he said the bill was amnesty only to have the White House later clarify that it wasn't what he meant.

Of course, there will be those who claim that the GOP will pay for the failure to get an immigration bill passed. Just ignore the fact that there were Democrats involved in this debacle - Ted Kennedy was the biggest supporter of the amnesty provisions (just as he was the last go-around) and Harry Reid had promised to get this bill done even as the prior version died after the sponsors tried to ram it through without debate. If the supporters of the immigration bill are so confident that such a plan would work, why were they so unwilling to debate the measures and enforcement provisions?

Could it be that there was little to justify them? Indeed, that's exactly the case. The bill was an amnesty for millions of illegal aliens, and the enforcement provisions were ridiculously lax.

Meanwhile, Sam Brownback's vote continues to cause controversy - most of it sparked by his own tortured logic on why he reversed himself. And this is someone who wants to be President?

UPDATE:
Yet another reason why people did not trust this bill, Congress, or the Administration to secure the border - because now that the bill was killed and the question was raised as to whether we could now proceed with a border security package first, the Administration demurred. Heh. As Allah notes, there never was any intention to secure the border and enforce the law.