Plenty more on this from Mickey Kaus here . Kaus effectively dispenses with the argument that Americans “won’t do these jobs” thus: “One solution is to raise the pay until enough Americans–including teens and college-age kids–and legal immigrants are willing to take the jobs. If the wage gets so high that machines can do the job more efficiently, then unskilled workers will gradually be replaced by robots. (Maybe Rove could tolerate having his son run a computerized robotic tomato picker.)”. That is, of course, quite right, even if it wouldn’t satisfy the cheap-labor junkies that appear to have so much of the American establishment’s ear. As for a McCain-Kennedy (and Bush?) plan designed (in name anyway) to give guestworkers a path to citizenship, something that Kaus might, he says, support were it feasible, he thinks that it simply won’t work. Its result would be “a huge new wave of illegal immigration, drawn by the reward of Bush’s semi-amnesty, that overwhelms the fancy new employer and border enforcement mechanisms and guest-worker safety valves Bush talks about. Lousy jobs will continue to be done by foreigners who have no “path to citizenship” and no legal authorization–it’s just that there will be many, many more of them and they will be more poorly paid.” That’s right. And, as so often, one is left wondering what it is that this White House thinks it is doing.