For those of you sensible enough to avoid watching President Bush's twenty minute attempt to distract the public from his other problems and shore up his sinking poll numbers address on immigration last night, the relentlessly evenhanded Kevin Drum of the Washington Monthly (by way of Irvine) has neatly summed things up:
Beef up the borders with troops and high tech wizardry but insist that it's not “militarization”; start up a guest worker program that's not called a guest worker program; introduce an amnesty program but insist that it's not an amnesty program (it's not, it's not, it's not!); and crack down on employers who employ illegal immigrants while pretending that they're actually victims of highly sophisticated fraud rather than willing coconspirators aided and abetted by the business wing of the Republican Party.
Others are not as gentle as Kevin. One critic of the central feature of Bush's plan, sending the National Guard to the border, rejected it as “a horribly over-expensive and very difficult way to manage this problem”. Who is this Bush basher? Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, who dismissed the idea of sending in the National Guard less than six months ago during an interview with Bill O'Reilly.
