I’m increasingly confident the Senate Judiciary Committee will fail to agree on an amnesty/guestworker program (they’re wrestling over the immigration bill some more this week). Today’s evidence is a column by Tamar Jacoby criticizing Arlen Specter’s amnesty bill, which is indeed a steaming pile of nonsense. Of course, Tamar supports–is in fact the de facto spokesman for–the McCain/Kennedy amnesty, which is a different, but equally steaming, pile of nonsense. Divisions among amnesty supporters may well enable opponents (Sessions, Coburn, Grassley) to prevail.

On the other hand, something in Tamar’s piece that caught my eye was her qualified acceptance of the Cornyn/Kyl bil’s requirement that illegals leave the country to apply for the guestworker program:

“Though few immigrants are likely to sign up for a program that would strand them outside the country, this approach might work if the trip were streamlined; that is to say, if immigrants were allowed to come back quickly enough that they didn’t lose their jobs or disrupt their families.”

In other words, amnesty supporters are likely to propose a compromise, wherein illegals would cross the border to Juarez, sign up for the guestworker program, and voila, they’d return the next day as legal workers and not get amnesty!