I’ve had a couple (precisely — two) e-mails along the following lines:
“You legal immigrants — you, Brimelow, etc. — are just piqued that the
Bush plan lets illegals bypass the tedious and expensive legal process that
you had to go through. I.e. you are whining. This is not a good basis from
which to criticize the Bush amnesty. It may indeed be unfair to the small
subset of the U.S. population who are legal immigrants; but if it’s good for
America, we should be willing to put up with some unfairness, as we often
do.”
Well, phooey to that. Certainly the Bush plan is very unfair to people who
have followed the rules, since it gives people who scoffed at the rules the
same benefit with less trouble and expense than we had. I don’t think that
unfairness is part of the case against the plan, though, and I have never
said I DID think that. I have used that unfairness only to explain a thing
that puzzles some people: Why so many of the folk who are angriest at GWB’s
proposed Coyote’s Charter are themselves immigrants. It’s not part of the
case against the CC, it’s just an explanation for some of the anger about
the CC. The CC is a bad, bad, bad idea for much better reasons than just
the pique it induces on us battered, beggared survivors of INS
legal-immigration proceedings.