The Bush administration has revealed the broad outline of its immigration-reform plan. It has three key components. First, it legalizes the approximately 10 million illegal aliens now present in the U.S. by creating a new type of temporary-worker visa. This visa would have a term of three years and would be renewable an unspecified number of times. Second, these visas would be available to persons now living abroad who have been offered employment by an American employer. As the White House puts it, the plan would “match willing foreign workers with willing U.S. employers when no Americans can be found to fill the jobs.” The implication is clear: Many American workers in many different industries will face direct competition from foreign workers. And third, the program would give temporary workers a path to permanent immigration by allowing them to apply for a green card. To take care of the backlog that will inevitably arise as millions of applications pour in, the president proposes an unspecified increase in the number of employment-based green cards that are granted each year.
Although the plan’s details remain sketchy, it is not too early to make a summary judgment about its conceptual underpinnings. In its ambition, in its misguided approach to social policy, and in the huge consequences it forebodes, the package bears more than a passing resemblance to Hillary Clinton’s ill-fated health-care proposal. The new bureaucrats in town must have worked equally long hours trying to fuse a lot of bad ideas into an incoherent policy.
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