Let me endorse what everyone has been saying in here about the difficulty of the immigration issue. The problem is once you have a large population of illegals in this country, there’s no easy way to handle it. That’s why a key test of the current bill has to be if it will avoid creating and/or tolerating such a large illegal population again. In my mind, it fails this test. The paradox is that as the bill seeks to be “tougher”–by piling requirements on the illegals–it makes it less likely that the illegals are going to comply. That, in turn, creates the seed of a new illegal population, which will be augmented by guest-workers who overstay, people who have come here since January, and new people drawn in by the message of the amnesty. The only way around this is to do enforcement first. Once you have a workable enforcement system in place–one that can keep large numbers of new people being drawn here by an amnesty–then you can and should do an amnesty, and one that doesn’t have some of the ridiculous bells and whistles attached that this one has. This is what I write about today here.