See Power Line Blog’s item here about the 83–16 vote yesterday in the Senate in favor of a bigger, better fence at the Mexican border.

In every state surveyed [by Rasmussen] except Massachusetts, at least 60% of respondents say we should “enforce existing laws and control the border before considering new reforms.”

Senators got the message, including presidential aspirants Hillary and Kerry, says NY Post’s Deborah Orin, cited here.

Thing is, to quote an expert John-Something on Bennett’s Morning in America (Bill should have given the last name when signing off on the guy), we can “assimilate” just so many newcomers.

It’s understood that it’s important they become like us, not the other way around, say I: they aren’t coming here because we’re like them but are escaping to the U.S., as Chicagoans escape to Wisconsin, or so says the Wis. tourist board, and I believe it. This John — maybe Hinderaker, of Power Line, but I doubt it — is very hot stuff.

For his ideas, and maybe I have John’s name wrong — had to go into the dining room for something — see Robert Rector’s piece at the Heritage Foundation, where we read that

the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act (CIRA, S.2611) would be the most dramatic change in immigration law in 80 years, allowing an estimated 103 million persons to legally immigrate to the U.S. over the next 20 years—fully one-third of the current population of the United States.

Rector is quoted nowhere in Chi Trib on immigration, by the way. Columnist Clarence Page cited him 4/23/06 in regard to welfare reform, identifying him as author of the 1996 welfare-reform bill. Good for Clarence. But why wouldn’t one of the reporters look up Heritage Foundation for research on this immigration reform? Maybe they haven’t got to it yet. It’s a “web memo” dated 5/15. More from Rector:

[T]he bill would quintuple the rate of legal immigration into the United States, raising, over time, the inflow of legal immigrants from around one million per year to over five million per year. The impact of this increase in legal immigration dwarfs the magnitude of the amnesty provisions.

Can we remain the same country if this happens? We are not talking salsa and tamales here, but importation of outlanders without our (fragile) concepts of rule by law — already undermined by race preference in legislation and judicial enforcement, to name one obvious area. Neither is it cheap gardeners or more Catholics in the pews or more Democrat voters, but people whose whole experience is a degree of political and civic corruption to make the Cook County machine look like better government. What is Bush thinking of, anyhow? Is it “guest workers”?

The “guest worker” program, then, is an open door program, based on the demands of U.S. business, that would allow an almost unlimited number of workers and dependents to enter the U.S. from anywhere in world and become citizens. It is essentially an “open border” provision.

. . . .

Assuming 10 percent annual growth in the annual number of guest workers entering the country (well below the bill’s maximum), the total inflow of workers under this program would be 20 million over 20 years.

Amnesty?

The bill would grant amnesty to roughly 10 million illegal immigrants. These individuals are currently living in the U.S.; amnesty would allow them to remain legally and to become U.S. citizens.

Green cards?

The bill would increase the number of employment-based visas from 140,000 to 450,000 per year. For the first time, it would also exempt the spouses and children of workers from the cap. Total annual immigration under this provision is likely to be 450,000 workers plus 540,000 family members annually. The net increase above current law over 20 years would be around 13.5 million persons.

We’re a nation of immigrants? Not quite:

Between 1870 and 1920, the U.S. experienced a massive flow of immigration known as the “great migration”. During this period, foreign born persons hovered between 13 and 15 percent of the population. In 1924, Congress passed major legislation greatly reducing future immigration. By 1970, foreign born persons had fallen to 5 percent of the population.

In the last three decades, immigration has increased sharply. The foreign born now comprise around 12 percent of the population, approaching the levels of the early 1900’s. However, if CIRA were enacted, and 100 million new immigrants entered the country over the next twenty years, foreign born persons would rise to over one quarter of the U.S. population. There is no precedent for that level of immigration at any time in U.S. history. [Italics mine]

What is he thinking of? This?

CIRA would transform the United States socially, economically, and politically. Within two decades, the character of the nation would differ dramatically from what exists today.

Remaking the nation.

John O’Sullivan in Sun-Times has a credible pre-speech analysis of what Bush has been saying and will continue to say to “smuggle” ill-advised ideas into the immigration debate, such as promising to beef up border security with 6,000 natl guard people: a bad idea, says O’S:

You cannot control the borders, however many patrols you hire or fences you build, if you grant an effective pardon to anyone who gets 100 miles inland.

Oh my.  How alarmingly reasonable.  He also makes hash of the denials of amnesty and cites expected #s of immigrants coming in thanks to a “compromise bill”: 

 [I]t doubles the number of legal immigrants — and [and] would admit 103 million new people over the next 20 years. It’s estimated that 19 million people would otherwise enter America over the same period.

And

the long-term cost of government benefits could be $30 billion per year or more: ”In the long run, the Hagel/Martinez bill, if enacted, would be the largest expansion of the welfare state in 35 years” [says Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation]. It was very sensible of the president not to bore the listeners with such details.

Sounds awful.  This is not Bush’s finest hour.

====================

Later: 

Here’s an angry response from a non-lib source, as quoted in Taranto’s WSJ Best of the Web:

Steve Sailer on VDare.com writes: “The Bush Administration has seemed never to notice that Mexico is not the 51st state, but a foreign country–one that is engaged in a slow-motion invasion of America. . . . Why is Bush doing this? I have suggested that his motives are dynastic–that he is selfishly sacrificing the GOP to build a family vehicle, much like Brian Mulroney sacrificed the Canadian Progressive Conservative party in a vain effort to build a personal fief in the French-speaking province of Quebec. Brenda Walker speculates he is a ‘MexiChurian Candidate.’ What he is not is an American patriot.”

Not B’s finest hour at all, no.

Eve Fairbanks of The New Republic in LA Times on silence at Harvard about the “Jewish lobby” paper by its drive-by Professor Walt and U Chi’s Professor Mearsheimer:

Call it the academic Cold War: distrustful factions rendered timid by the prospect of mutually assured career destruction.

No problem here, teachers et al. told her when she asked around about shots heard ‘round the world in furious dispute over the Walt-M 3/23 London Review of Books essay nailing Jews for lobbying vs. Arabs and turning the U.S. govt. around for their own purposes.  Her New Repub had run three articles.  She wondered what’s up in Cambridge, where dons get heated fairly easily.  Not this time.

One anecdote illuminated the puzzle. At a faculty meeting, the paper came up, and the department head remarked that she was sure everyone had the same reaction when they read it — approval. One professor piped up: “No, this article is rubbish!” The room became very quiet. Finally, someone changed the subject. Through moments like these, a de facto consensus developed not to discuss the paper at all.

It’s too serious for them to talk about it, apparently. 

Professors I spoke to offered various reasons they must tiptoe around the paper: That its style was too provocative. That they’re skittish after witnessing Harvard President Larry Summers’ ouster for making fractious comments. That the long-running PC wars have made them tired of controversy. That it’s too “personal.”

Anyhow, the Middle East is too hot a subject — “too strewn with ideological landmines for them because academics are supposed to be above dogma.”  Hence the Cold War doomsday scenario:

One observer close to the debate [explained ] that he had opinions concerning the paper but feared professional retaliation no matter what he might say.

“People might debate it if you gave everyone a get-out-of-jail-free card,” he said, “and promised that afterward everyone would be friends.”

Yes.  And we should bow to their superior wisdom?

From Wall St. Journal:

Liberals who object to datamining [as by NSA with telephone numbers] should wait until they see the “massive intrusion on personal privacy” that Americans will demand if the U.S. homeland gets hit again.

Moreover,

since the database doesn’t involve any wiretapping, FISA [the law vs. wiretapping without warrant] doesn’t apply. The FISA statute specifically says its regulations do not cover any “process used by a provider or customer of a wire or electronic communication service for billing, or recording as an incident to billing.”

As for Di-Fi of Calif. (Feinstein) and invoking the 4th amendment,

the Supreme Court has already held (Smith v. Maryland, 1979) that the government can legally collect phone numbers since callers who expect to be billed by their phone company have no “reasonable expectation of privacy” concerning such matters.

Leave us not forget the other Fein senator, Feingold of the great state of Wisconsin, who says

we should definitely be listening to al Qaeda but that Mr. Bush has committed an impeachable offense by doing it the wrong way. Republicans would love to see a Democratic Presidential nominee take that proposition into the 2008 election.

WSJ concludes by noting that “maybe–just maybe–the aggressive surveillance policies of the Bush Administration are one reason” why we haven’t been attacked since 9/11.  Maybe our fine senators should think more about that.

Lead for today’s Chi Trib headline story, “Bush: No laws were broken; Millions of phone records reportedly sold to NSA,” by Stephen J. Hedges and Mark Silva, Washington Bureau:

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration Thursday vigorously defended aggressive counter-terrorist electronic surveillance by the National Security Agency, which has obtained millions of domestic phone numbers in a so far successful effort to detect terrorist activity in the U.S. since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Kidding.  Here’s the real one, with italics added:

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration Thursday reacted defensively to news that the secretive National Security Agency, which conducts electronic eavesdropping, had obtained millions of domestic phone records in an effort to detect terrorist activity in the U.S. since the Sept. 11 attacks.

I know it’s a lot to ask, but wouldn’t it be nice if Chi Trib writers & editors might sometimes let it go?