The Lesser Of Two Evils: Immigration Reform By Senator Frist

Bryanna Bevens

03/18/2006

It has been rumored that a majority of the 18 voting members of the Senate Judiciary Committee favor some form of guest worker plan that would essentially extend amnesty to the 12 to 20 million illegal aliens living in the United States.

Senator Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennesse [send him mail] informed the Judiciary Committee that he would introduce his own immigration reform bill should the committee fail to agree on a version before next week’s Congressinal recess.

True to form, the committee had not come to an agreement by yesterday’s deadline and Senator Frist introduced his bill (PDF here):

  1. Require all employers to verify the identity and immigration status of their employees through an electronic system.
  2. Assess civil penalties of between $500 and $20,000 against employers for each illegal immigrant they hire and criminal penalties of up to $20,000 per illegal immigrant hired and up to six months in jail for engaging in a pattern of employing illegal workers.
  3. Add 4,400 Border Patrol agents over six years to the 10,000 Congress provided for in the intelligence reform law passed in 2004, and 1,000 more immigrant smuggling investigators over the next five years.
  4. More than double the number of employment-based green cards, from 140,000 to 290,000, and make more employment based visas available to unskilled workers. It also would free up other visas by exempting immediate relatives of U.S. citizens from being counted in the annual pool of 480,000 visas, and increase country-by-country ceilings on family sponsored and employment-based immigrants.

Yeah … I’m not really okay with the increase in green cards but every cloud has a silver lining:

NO GUEST WORKER PLAN … NO AMNESTY!!!

Senator Frist is one of the strongest Republican candidates for President in 2008 and recently won the straw poll at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference.

This is what I think we can safely derive from the Frist legislation:

Senator Frist has sifted through all the garbage the Raza lobby has sold to the MSM and instead — wait for it — listened to the American voters.

What a novel approach …

Come election time the voters will want to see some real reform and a guest worker plan/amnesty deal won’t cut it … it will succeed only in enraging the American public and I think Frist may have figured that out.

Now if only some of his buddies (Specter, McCain and the Gang) would come on board …

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