The Illegal Immigration Bill

The Secure Borders, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Reform Act of 2007.

More on how to read/comment on the bill.

Anybody want to guess on how many senators will have read this bill closely before the public debate starts early in the new week?

With H/T to Instapundit and thanks for NZ Bear for the good work in making this bill so accessible to all of us. Now, may it experience a rapid legislative death.

More on the illegal immigration issue here, here, here, and here.

ADDENDUM:

Thanks to Power Line for more on the heated exchange between Senators McCain and Cornyn - plus some insights into particularly important deportation and enforcement provisions in prior and current bills. (H/T Michelle Malkin.)

Hugh Hewitt's writes these words to his friends at Power Line: "The bill's indifference to terrorism is stunning."

Hewitt's opinions on the draft bill are here. In that link, he writes:

There are so many problems with this bill that it should not be introduced in the Senate absent a period of open hearings on it and the solicitation of expert opinion from various analysts across the ideological spectrum. Even were it somehow to improbably make its way to the president's desk, if it does so before these problems are aired and confronted, the Congress would be inviting a monumental distrust of the institution. There is simply too much here to say "Trust us," and move on. The jam down of such a far reaching measure, drafted in secret and very difficult for laymen much less lawyers to read, is fundamentally inconsistent with how we govern ourselves.

More information leads over at The Corner. National Review editors have this to say.

Rich Lowry weighs in.

The U.S. has now constructed .286 percent of the 700 miles of fencing on the southern border provided for in 2006’s Secure Fence Act. That is sufficient for a bipartisan group of senators to want to effectively declare this brief national experiment with immigration enforcement effectively over.

Enough with the harsh exclusionary measures! Two miles of fencing out of 700 passed by Congress on a border stretching 1,952 miles is a milestone that should mark our departure to the next phase of immigration policy — a sweeping amnesty of illegals and an increase in legal immigration. Thus, another confirmation of the iron rule of the nation’s immigration politics: No matter how discontented the public is with our broken immigration system, the political elite’s answer is always higher levels of immigration...

Heather Mac Donald shares these thoughts:

...Its key feature is rather that illegal aliens, according to press reports, can immediately have their illegal status wiped away with a temporary-residency permit, available virtually upon demand. That’s it. The rest is noise...There is no ambiguity about the effects of amnesty. Everywhere they have been introduced—including in Europe—they have brought in their train a new flood of illegals. This latest bill will do the same.

Kathryn Lopez has some initial reactions.