The year was 1953 and we had a million illegals crossing the border every year illegally. Farmers in the southwest were exploiting the immigrants for cheap labor. Democrat politicians were favoring open borders amongst them future president Lyndon Baines Johnson. A culture of corruption was in place where the guilty were shielded.

Ike saw the problem. He acted by appointing General Joeseph Swing as head of the border patrol. General Swing took the entrenched bureaucracy out the picture and then under President Eisenhower’s orders began deporting illegals at the rate of 1000 a day.

By the end of operation wetback they had deported 50,000 aliens from Arizona and California, and another 80,000 from Texas. 1000000 + left voluntarily.

54 years later, 10 times as many border patrol agents and we need a giant fence and amnesty. I don’t think so. We need a new president that will do what needs being done. We need to kill any bill from congress until we get one.

Like Andy, I’m not a “restrictionist”. I believe in efficient, secure legal immigration. But, having been through the system myself, I found this a bit of a jaw-dropper:

Section 601(h) Treatment of Applicants

(1) IN GENERAL —An alien who files application for Z-nonimmigrant status shall, upon submission of any evidence required under paragraphs (f) and (g) and after the Secretary has conducted appropriate background checks, to include name and fingerprint checks, that have not by the end of the next business day produced information rendering the applicant ineligible

(A) be granted probationary benefits in the form of employment authorization pending final adjudication of the alien’s application;

B) may in the Secretary’s discretion receive advance permission to re-enter the United States pursuant to existing regulations governing advance parole;

(C) may not be detained for immigration purposes, determined inadmissible or deportable, or removed pending final adjudication of the alien’s application, unless the alient is determined to be ineligible for Z nonimmigration status; and

(D) may not be considered an unauthorized alien (as defined in Section 274A(h)(3) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1324a(h)(3))) unless employment authorization under subparagraph (A) is denied.

Is that This-background-check-will-self-destruct-in-24-hours clause for real? If the entire “undocumented” population of, say, Falls Church, Virginia wanders into the local immigration office at 4pm on Monday, the clerks have got till 5pm on Tuesday to find anything on the guys or they’ve got no choice but to issue the Z visa? For the agency that takes the best part of a decade to process nanny applications and which sent Mohammed Atta his visa six months after he’d died, this is, to say the least, a massive cultural change.

If the 24-hour dry-cleaner standard were to be mandated for every government agency, I might reconsider my position. But it seems curious, to put it at its mildest, that only the lucky members of the Undocumented-American community will get to enjoy the benefits of express service from the US government.

Sheesh…

Here’s an inside view from a Senate staffer with good reason to know what was going on:

The answer to your question — could there be a good bill — is emphatically “no.”

But it’s worse than that. There were already more than 60 votes in the Democrat-controlled Senate to pass a straight-up McCain-Kennedy bill before this whole conversation ever started. The Krikorians of the world were facing defeat from the moment we lost last fall’s election.

So why are there conservatives in this deal? Why Kyl, Cornyn, Isakson, Chambliss? Because McCain, Graham, and Martinez (those three in particular) wanted to use them as political cover, which they are already doing aggressively. (Graham at press conference Thursday: “This bill couldn’t happen without Jon Kyl.”)

So they told Kennedy that he had to satisfy Kyl and the others. The conservatives saw this as an opportunity to get real enforcement and to create a merit-based system to replace chain migration for the future. They were getting something for nothing, because amnesty was already going to happen regardless. After all, some form of amnesty was the Democrats’ non-negotiable demand, and the President had already advocated it repeatedly.

But McCain’s crowd kept saying that no deal could be done without Kyl etc., right? Sure, they said it. And if the conservatives had walked away, the negotiations would have stopped for all of about 1 week, at which point the White House would come calling, asking their hand-picked RNC Chairman to help them cut the best deal they could with Kennedy, the conservatives be damned.

And Martinez would have done it, in a heartbeat, because he thinks people living in shadows is the worst thing since … well, I was going to say “Castro” but that’s too harsh.

And let’s not be fooled into thinking that McCain would have had political qualms about going that direction; after all, he was thrilled jump into the camera frame with Ted Kennedy at the Thursday press conference.

No, the original pro-amnesty coalition from last year would have more-or-less held together, the enforcement demands would have been gutted, and there would be an expansion of family-based chain migration, not an elimination. The President, willing to partner with anybody to get ANY bill, would easily have signed.

The question was whether a bad bill would be downright horrid, or merely odious. Kyl at least thinks he got the latter.

Of course, this bill never becomes law, but that’s another discussion.