And so far it’s been a lot of smoke and mirrors.

My favorite so far is the repeated assurance that an employer will have to demonstrate a substantive effort to locate and hire Americans before they try for a ‘guest worker.’ I can see it now: “Yes, Mr. govt. person, I’ve tried and tried and just can’t find any American to pick my cotton fields for $5/hour.”

We are reminded with assertion after assertion that this is NOT and amnesty, and that the President is resolutely OPPOSED to amnesty…

And when Hutchinson was asked point blank if we could not just enforce our laws against the illegals among us. Talk about obfuscation! The first problem he cited was that, well, we don’t know where they all are …

I can’t help thinking that the next time someone says, “Bush lied.”

We can say, “he certainly did. He said ‘This is not an amnesty!’”

Dan Stein of FAIR said of the ‘This is not an amnesty’ canard, to paraphrase: “We call this the Rip Van Winkle argument of American politics. If you think this is proposal is not an amnesty then you’ve been asleep for 20 years.”

The President is correct: this is not an amnesty. For the same reason Australia is not an island and the Queen Mary is not a boat.

Repeat after me: Deportation IS amnesty. Deportation IS amnesty. Deportation IS amnesty…

Listening to the testimony yesterday, especially from Asa Hutchinson and the mexican, Aguirre, I noted that both men said that “willing employers” will be required to recruit American citizens first, before seeking “willing workers” outside the U.S. Of course, there was no mention whether the advertisement for jobs must be in English or whether they could go out in Spanish, Urdu, Chinese, or what have you. Just another one of the thousands of little details that will allow the open borders crowd to get away with murder.

“The President is correct: this is not an amnesty. For the same reason Australia is not an island and the Queen Mary is not a boat.”

Of course not. Australia is a continent, and the Queen Mary is an ocean liner. :-)

An HR person told about a trick he has employed.
He would advertise in a small ethnic community newspapapers in Florida for a job in Chicago. Guaranteed to have a lot of qualified applicants :-)

Speaking of HR department tricks, I used to be puzzled at the ridiculously detailed specifications for exactly who would qualify for a certain technical job, such as a computer software job, that would be in the classified section of a trade magazine such as Electronic Engineering Times. The job ad would list exactly what courses you had to have taken, exactly how many years and months yuo should have spent in each of three prior positions, etc.

Then it was explained to me that, in order to hire certain non-citizens, employers had to advertise the job so citizens could apply. That is why the ads were the smallest permissible print, listed a P.O. Box or a referral box with the Department of Employment in their state, and otherwise hid from view who they were and what exactly you would be doing, AND announced that the salary would be about 70-80% of what it should be on the open market. They did not want anyone to apply, they had a foreigner already in the position, so they just put his life story in the ad and claimed these were the exact qualifications.

Mr. Coleman’s anecdote provides a disturbing glimpse into the way things are actually run in this country with enormous government agencies and bureaucracies determining everything. There is no solution to that but a return to limited constitutional government.

On the hearings, it was not all bad signs, not by a long shot. Senators Kyl, Saxby (the chairman), Sessions and others were pretty firm in their dislike of this bill and on the unacceptability of pushing this radical expansion when we’re not enforcing current laws. But there was also weasel language. Thus Kyl said things like, “If the American people are to accept this bill, we must convince them that we’re enforcing existing law.” He didn’t say, we MUST ENFORCE existing law, only that we must convince the people that we’re enforcing it.

Politicians are so skilled at this kind of thing, sounding as though they’re drawing a line in the sand, when in fact they’re sending out a dance card for the Hegelian Mambo. :-)

Mr. Auster writes:
“Mr. Coleman’s anecdote provides a disturbing glimpse into the way things are actually run in this country with enormous government agencies and bureaucracies determining everything. There is no solution to that but a return to limited constitutional government.”

There is no disagreement here with return to limited gov. But specific law in question here, the one that provides for H1B visas is designed to privatize profits and socialize costs.

The law is written and enforced (what’s that?) in such a way that a private company determines if there is a shortage of american labor in a particular category given that company is willing to pay a very low wage for a skill set. An employer has a virtually unlimited freedom to define shortage, skill sets, etc. As any honest HR person will tell you, there is never an unsuccessful attempt to bring an immigrant on H1B visa.