Borders? We don't need no stinkin' borders!

Better no immigration bill at all than this one. Alfonso Bedoya explains it.

This whole immigration debate makes so little sense, just starting from the basics, that it seems like there must be more to it, that our masters are not telling us about. (How it pains me to write "our masters.") When I was a kid in the 1950's, every winter we would see announcements on the TV urging resident aliens to register at the Post Office. We've come a long way.

Apparently the registration at the post office requirement was dropped in 1981. By that time we had already had the first amnesty sponsored by Ted Kennedy, the Hart-Celler Act of 1965. 21 years later, Kennedy was involved with another massive amnesty program, the Simpson-Mazzoli Immigration Reform and Control Act (Andrew McCarthy has some satirical history). I say Kennedy "was involved" with IRCA because, though he spoke in favor of it, and authored some amendments to it, he apparently claims to have voted against it. (No telling how long that last link will last.) Now, 22 years after that, Kennedy's doing it again.

This post is formless and vague, but I'll post it just to get the link to the article by Fredo Arias-King up. I want to get to the subject of how Ted Kennedy, in particular, learned early on that rules are made to be broken.

Bill Quick linked this article by Fredo Arias-King a while back: Immigration and Usurpation: Elites, Power, and the People’s Will. It seems to connect to the poem by Berthold Brecht:

The Solution

After the uprising of the 17th June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

Can our political class have become so removed from their roots in the citizenry that they would rather import a new population than represent the one that's here?

Tony Blankley in the Washington Times: Immigration Inconsistencies.

If we, the American people, wanted to expel all of the illegal aliens who are illegally here now, we could do so. We went to the Moon, on a whim. There is nothing of a practical nature that Americans can't do, once they decide to do it. American know-how, the can-do spirit, Rosie the Riveter graphic goes here. But to try to run a welfare state and keep the borders open at the same time, is suicide.

It's great for the poverty pimps, though. If you're a champion of the downtrodden, you wouldn't want to run out of poor people. So importing large numbers of them would help to ensure a supply. It's just like outsourcing! Oh, not really.

Tunku Varadarajan of the Wall Street Journal interviewing Milton and Rose Friedman:

Is immigration, I asked--especially illegal immigration--good for the economy, or bad? "It's neither one nor the other," Mr. Friedman replied. "But it's good for freedom. In principle, you ought to have completely open immigration. But with the welfare state it's really not possible to do that. . . . She's an immigrant," he added, pointing to his wife. "She came in just before World War I." (Rose--smiling gently: "I was two years old.") "If there were no welfare state," he continued, "you could have open immigration, because everybody would be responsible for himself." Was he suggesting that one can't have immigration reform without welfare reform? "No, you can have immigration reform, but you can't have open immigration without largely the elimination of welfare."

So this post is a draft. Alpha minus one. Link dump!