Bushwhacking Immigration.

IMMIGRATION policy; IMMIGRATION opponents; ADMISSION of nonimmigrants; UNITED States emigration & immigration; BUSH, George W. (George Walker), 1946-

The article looks at comments made by United States President George W. Bush in his January 2004 State of the Union Address on immigration policies. The mess in our immigration laws festers. And if it is so that Bush was moved to try to do something about it in anticipation of November's national election, why should that surprise, let alone dismay us? We should not allow our general relapse on illegal immigration to blind us to our own acquiescence to the impasse brought on. The 1965 immigration law effectively eliminated restrictions on immigration from this hemisphere through its family-reunification provisions. We discovered little by little, under the pressure of local politics and judicial intervention, that restricting immigration is not done by pen strokes. Eight million illegals testify to the irresolution of our immigration laws. We discovered that you cannot do something that California, Arizona, Texas, and Florida will not permit: so we surrendered. The Bush immigration plan is so complicated, so dependent on enforcement agencies we do not have and do not really want, that it is impossible to say what lies immediately ahead for the proposed bill.