The chorus of protest over the bill in the Senate right now (the "No Illegal Alien Left Behind" act, as some would call it, or the "Destroy America Now" act) is coming from so many places, and from so many unlikely sources that it is getting difficult to keep up.
While criticism has come from the usual quarters, even such open-borders advocates as George Will and John Podhoretz have come down hard on the bill. The staggering costs of the bill, only just now coming to light, have revealed a total outlay of as much as 2.5 trillion over the next two decades. Ed Morrissey notes that the bill has achieved the remarkable distinction of having almost every single voting group in the USA opposed to it:
Not a single demographic in the study favors this proposal, except under Race: Other. Democrats oppose it 51-28. Republicans oppose it 47-25. Men and women both clearly oppose it. Only people ages 30-39 come close to overcoming opposition, 34-32 in opposition. But when the subject turns to border security, the numbers turn even more dramatic....The data is so compelling, one has to wonder why Congress hasn't realized that they could offer a win for everyone by focusing exclusively on border security as an entrée to immigration reform. They literally would please every possible constituency by doing so, and would almost overnight dial down the emotion over the rest of the issue. Only in DC could the governing class be so out of touch with the national mood.
Meanwhile, another blogger eviscerates the irrational arguments of those like Dick Morris, Robert Novak and Fred Barnes that the GOP must support this bill or risk losing Hispanic votes:
The GOP has got to understand that they will never, ever be able to compete with Democrats when it comes to appealing to poor, uneducated welfare cases -- which is exactly the category most of these illegal aliens would fall into. That's because Democrats, being big government socialists, will always be willing to offer them more goodies for their votes. The GOP's target audience among Hispanics will be more educated, more successful, more middle-class Hispanics, not poverty cases or the La Raza crowd. That means for the GOP to gain with Hispanics over the long term, we've got to push policies that will allow the Hispanics who are already American citizens to become more successful, not bring in penniless, uneducated manual laborers from South America by the tens of millions and hope that they'll vote for us because we're "democrat light" on amnesty and welfare.
In the most amusing quote of the day, Barack Obama set some sort of Democratic first in the following critique of one of the few sensible changes in the bill - placing a skills requirement for immigrants above that of extended family ties:
This change "constitutes at minimum a radical experiment in social engineering and a departure from our tradition of having family and employers invite immigrants to come," Obama said.
A Democrat criticizing something for being a radical social experiment that's a departure from historical tradition? I'm expecting to see pigs flying around Nashville right about now.
