Roger: But the Senate bill, which I believe Linda favors, includes permanent legal residence for current illegal residents and eight years of family reunification measures for them and the current heavily-national-origin-biased immigrant population, both legal and illegal. That is even if you take the enforcement provisions seriously and believe the bill, or one anything much like it, would not deliver a huge boost to illegal entry across the southern border. Which, in common with many other critics of the bill, I don’t. Given deep skepticism about enforcement of current or future laws–about either the will or the administrative ability to enforce them–as expressed on The Corner by myself and other commentators–it makes sense to look at immigration from a de facto, not a de jure point of view. That’s what I was trying to do there. De facto, current immigration policy implements massive favoritism towards Latin Americans. De facto, there are strong reasons to doubt that the Senate bill would change this much. Those like Linda who favor the bill, favor this system, wich is de facto comparable to the old national-origins quota system they affect to deplore. It favors people from some nations, at the expense of people from other nations. That’s what it does. That, as best I can guess, is what it would continue to do under the proposed new legislation.