John McCain Knows More About Amnesty Plan Than Anyone Else, Except That That Minor Provision About Paying Back Taxes Has Been Dropped

Fuck you, I know everything there is to know!

Oh, wait, I didn't know that.

My bad.

Fuck you anyway, buddy! I served in 'Nam!

Kaus notes:

Even if they now stick the "back taxes" provision back in to avoid throwing what McCain calls "fuel on the fire," that's not the point. The point is that Bush has repeatedly used the "back taxes" argument to sell his plan, yet he took it out--in other words, you can't trust him to do anything he's promised to do when it comes to burdening illegal immigrants. As Krikorian says,

the president is opposed — morally and emotionally repelled — by the idea of enforcing the border with Mexico. It's just uncompassionate, in his view, and nothing's going to change that ...

Oh, be silly, you! Haven't you heard-- part of Bush's scary-effective "enforcement trigger" plan is to purchase four -- count 'em, four!!! -- unmanned aerial reconnaisance drones to patrol the entirety of the southern border.

Four! That's one whole UAV for each state bordering Mexico!

Suck on that, bigots!

Another Kaus tidbit: Don't think the lefties are going to take this bill for being not-quite-generous enough. One, they know that what little there is in the bill about enforcement, or being tough about chain-migration, will quickly be taken out.

Two, they know this is the last shot they'll ever get at this. They desperately don't want do this unilaterally, and they have -- for the last time in a long time -- a Republican President willing to give them a schmear of bipartisan cover.

They know they'll never again be in a position to force an unpopular plan down the throats of a hostile American public with the political mitigation of being able to say "Even the Republican President supported this."

In fact, if they push this through, they might never again be in a position where they even have to deal with a Republican President again....

Bonus! Increased Immigration Depresses Wages For Poorer Blacks, Results in Greater Rates of Crime and Incarceration: Well, gee, now I don't know how I feel about this.

On one hand, it will destroy the economy. On the other hand -- more blacks in poverty and/or jail!

...a 10 percent rise in immigrants in a particular skill group significantly trimmed the wages of black and white men alike.... Beyond that, however, the black-white experience differed markedly, especially for low-skilled workers. Take employment rates: from 1960 to 2000, black high school dropouts saw their employment rates drop 33 percentage points –– from 88.6 percent to 55.7 percent -- the authors found in their analysis of census data from 1960 to 2000. The decrease for white high school dropouts was only roughly half that –– from 94.1 percent to 76.0 percent.

One reason, the authors argue, is that black employment is more sensitive to an immigration influx than white employment….

That same immigration rise was also correlated with a rise in incarceration rates. For white men, a 10 percent rise in immigration appeared to cause a 0.1 percentage point increase in the incarceration rate for white men. But for black men, it meant a nearly 1 percentage-point rise.

Why would a boost in immigration effectively put more men, especially black men, behind bars? The authors put forward a straightforward theory: immigration causes wages and employment to fall for black workers. When this happens, some of those workers –– especially those with the lowest skills -- turn to crime to increase their income. …

The authors stress that immigration is only one factor in the worsening labor situation of low-skilled African-American men. "The 1980-2000 immigrant influx, therefore, generally ‘explains' about 20 to 60 percent of the decline in wages, 25 percent of the decline in employment, and about 10 percent of the rise in incarceration rates among blacks with a high school education or less," they write.

That's a damn hard call to make. I'm torn. I mean, I want to live in a lily-white country walled off from the Brown Peril, but I need to have all those additional black men in the slammer...

What a masterstroke -- adding thirty million new lower-wage workers in need of lifelong government assistance, while making life appreciably more difficult for those lower-wage workers we already have.

posted by Ace at 01:49 PM

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