Unsurprisingly, our parasitic southern neighbors are miffed that the Senate bill failed and therefore borders will not be opened still wider for their convenience.

MEXICO CITY, June 29 — Latin America reacted with sharp disappointment Friday to the U.S. Senate’s defeat of an immigration bill, a decision that Mexican President Felipe Calderon called “a grave error” and Salvadoran President Elias Antonio Saca said was “a pity.” [...]

In an editorial published Friday, the Mexico City newspaper El Universal said it is “highly hypocritical that the United States admits migrants as peasants, but does not accept them as citizens. A state that sends troops to the Middle East to try to implant democracy and respect for human rights does not practice such supreme values in its own territory.”
[Sharp Reaction to Immigration Bill's Defeat, Washington Post 6/30/07]

As usual, the professional Mexican whiners are full of it. The United States has the most generous system of legal immigration on earth, and much of it is based on family ties, so millions of “peasants” have in fact become citizens.

Latin politicians care only about the remittances sent by their nation’s escapees that keep their corrupt states afloat. El Salvador received $3.3 billion in remittances in 2006, nearly all from Salvadorans living in the U.S. PBS has said that remittance money there “dwarfs every other industry.”

Mexico is the biggest remittance junky, however, with $23 billion received in 2006. Millions of Mexican families depend on money sent from relatives in the United States, a situation that does not foster pressure on Mexico’s government for economic reform. It’s so much easier for Mexican pundits and pols to complain about America than look into the mirror!

George Borjas has a long post on the defeat of the immigration bill, and in the middle of it there’s this worrisome thought:

Does this end the debate over immigration? No.

Why? Because our immigration system is truly broken.

Regardless of what happened at the Senate today, there are still 12 million illegal immigrants living in the country, and that number is increasing at the rate of about half-a-million a year. And there’s no longer any need for the Bush administration to keep playing the charade of “more enforcement” that received wide media attention in the past few months.

Two possible answers to Federal corruption and willing lack of enforcement are efforts by local police to enforce the immigration law, and the Minutemen Civil Defense Corps.

But both of them may find that they’re being harassed by the same Federal Government that won’t do its job on the border.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that! From the Democratic President’s debate last night at Howard U. in DC in front of a mostly black audience:

NPR’s Michel Martin: “[W]hat is the plan to stop and to protect these young people from this scourge [AIDS]?” …

Sen. Joe Biden: “I got tested for AIDS. I know Barack got tested for AIDS. There’s no shame in being tested for AIDS. It’s an important thing.” …

OBAMA: Tavis, Tavis, Tavis, I just got to make clear — I got tested with Michelle. (Laughter, applause.)

SMILEY: Ah.

OBAMA: In — when we were in Kenya in Africa. So I don’t want any confusion here about what’s going on. (Applause continues.)

SMILEY: All right. …

OBAMA: I was tested with my wife.

SMILEY: And I’m sure Michelle appreciates you clarifying it.

OBAMA: In public. (Laughter.)

You hopefully know Untethered Dennis Dale for his Repo Man meets Nabokov memoirs of growing up in LA’s suburban wasteland. Having seen the global projection of American military might up close, he’s also a political thinker of some power:

One reason why a democracy cannot survive empire, and why empires are increasingly short-lived things, is that citizens of conquered and occupied nations, and cultures, half a world away, thereby become people to whom the leadership of the imperial power is answerable, in one way or another:

“The Americans know everything, they can do everything, they can repair the space shuttle without touching it, why do they let these things happen here in Iraq?” said Abu Muhammad, 55, one of the custodians of the bombed Khalani Mosque.

Good question, and one for which the man has the right to an answer. Mr., or Mrs., (future) President, meet one of your constituents. He has a few problems he’d like to bring to your attention.

He expands upon the philosophy of invade the world, invite the world here at greater length.

A reader of my By their fruits blog - which listed the twelve Republican S.1639 miscreants – felt I should have made more effort to name those who deserve praise. She specifically mentioned Senator Cornyn of Texas and Senator Vitter of Louisiana. A Certain Slant of Light has had the grace to take this a step further, courteously proposing thanks to Senators Sessions, DeMint and Vitter.

ACSL is not courteous about Mexico’s insolent reaction to the bill’s defeat.

Hopefully, Scott Rasmussen’s polling business will get a lot of new business because he was so much more correct about public opinion on immigration than the established polls. Why was he more accurate? Because he thought through the issue so much more logically.

His company released this wrap-up yesterday:

Scott Rasmussen’s first law of politics is that America’s politicians aren’t nearly as important as they think they are. That law was clearly demonstrated earlier today when the United States Senate finally surrendered to the American people on immigration. Politicians may make things messy for a while, but over the long haul it is the American people who determine the nation’s fundamental policies.

The final Rasmussen Reports national telephone poll before the vote found that just 22% of Americans supported the legislation. No amount of Presidential persuasion, Senate logrolling, and procedural tricks was able to overcome that solid bi-partisan lack of public support (although it’s breathtaking to consider how close a determined leadership could come to passing such an unpopular bill).

The real mystery in all of this is why the Senators and their cheerleaders didn’t anticipate the public response. Perhaps they fell in love with their own rhetoric and forgot how it might sound to others.

Near the end of the debate, supporters of the doomed legislation often stated that the status quo is unacceptable. Most Americans would agree on that point. In fact, they might even hold that feeling more strongly than the Grand Bargainers of the Senate–72% of American voters believe it’s Very Important to reduce illegal immigration and enforce the borders. But controlling the border was never a focal point of the Senate debate. Instead, the Senators spent most of the time debating the fine points of various approaches to legalizing those who are here illegally. For voters, those topics were definitely a second-or-third tier aspect of the issue.

Because the Senators and the White House never showed much enthusiasm for reducing illegal immigration, only 16% believed the Senate bill would accomplish that goal. Forty-one percent (41%) thought passage of the legislation would actually lead to more illegal immigration. In other words, even though voters consider the status quo unacceptable, they had every confidence that Congress could make a bad situation worse.

It is impossible to overstate the significance of this basic fact. Outside of 46 Senators, hardly anybody thought the legislation would work. That’s why it was defeated. It wasn’t amnesty or guest-worker programs or paths to citizenship that doomed the bill. Each of those provisions made it more difficult for some segments of the population to accept. However, a majority would have accepted them as part of a true compromise that actually gained control of the border.

In that environment, the only way for political leaders to prove they are serious about enforcing the border and reducing illegal immigration will be to do it. That’s the next logical step in the immigration debate.

From the Washington Post:

NEWPORT, R.I., June 28 — He looked uncharacteristically dejected as he approached the lectern, fiddling with papers as he talked and avoiding the sort of winking eye contact he often makes with reporters. And then President Bush did something he almost never does: He admitted defeat.

“A lot of us worked hard to see if we couldn’t find a common ground,” he said an hour after his immigration plan died on Capitol Hill. “It didn’t work.”

It was, in the end, simply a statement of reality after the Senate buried his proposal to overhaul immigration laws. ..

In March, he told an audience in Guatemala that he had to get an immigration bill to his desk by August to have a chance of success. After that, he reasoned, the congressional budget calendar and the presidential election campaign would make it impossible. But he and Rove remained supremely confident that they would prevail. Just 17 days ago, while in Bulgaria, Bush brushed off pessimism about the legislation. “I’ll see you at the bill-signing,” he predicted.

By Thursday, his tone had changed. He made no pretense that the immigration initiative might still be revived before he leaves office. Instead, he indicated that he is moving on to other issues. He would probably not admit to being humbled, but he appeared at least chagrined.

At one point during his Iraq speech, Bush pleaded for patience with Iraqis trying to pass reconciliation legislation. “In a democracy,” he said, “the head of government just can’t decree the outcome.”

The audience laughed. Bush smiled wanly and joked: “I’m not saying that’s what I’d like to do.”

It’s just not fair. If only those Guatemalans could vote in American elections already, then poor Mr. Bush wouldn’t be so sad. But that nasty Constitution has some technicality in it about only American citizens getting to vote, so the President’s fondest dream couldn’t come true.

Seriously, let’s stop and think about what an enormous waste of six years it has been for the President, aided and abetted by the almost the entire American Establishment, to pursue his delusion of imposing his immigration obsession on the citizenry. Even leaving aside how much better the immigration situation would be if Bush had followed his oath and simply enforced the damn laws, imagine what he would have been able to accomplish legislatively in other areas without wasting time, energy, and political capital on a losing proposition like this.

John Podhoretz [Send him mail] writes in the NYPost about Dubya’s latest disastrous political failure.

But he miscalculated, as he has done so often since his re-election. He chose to believe polls that said Americans generally support the nice ideas in the bill rather than the polls that showed Americans disliked the actual bill as written and described.

And perhaps most interesting, Bush chose to believe it was more important to court potential future Republican voters - those illegals who would have gained a “path to citizenship” under the terms of the bill in 13 years’ time - rather than listen to the concerns of present-day Republican voters.
DUBYA’S END By JOHN PODHORETZ June 29, 2007

There are number of things wrong with that, including the fact that amnesty isn’t really a nice idea, that the illegals are NOT potential Republican voters, and the idea that Bush is seeking the “legalized illegal” vote, rather than the plain old Hispanic vote, is actually new.(But check out this parody from 2006.)

However, Podhoretz goes on to mention a number of the things that are in fact wrong with the bill:

Those concerns were entirely justified. I write as someone out of step with my fellow conservatives on the issue, as someone with a very liberal view of immigration, including illegal immigration. A[Vdare.com note: No kidding.See VDARE.com: 01/12/04 - Attack Of The Pod Person II: Amnesty To Remake America]And yet the more I read about the bill, the more it was clear to me it was an unholy mess and that the nation would be far better off without it.

Neither the president nor any of the bill’s supporters was able to make a convincing argument that illegal immigration would be “reformed” in any way. The bill was a classic case of a supposed fix that would only make things worse. It would have levied significant penalties on those who chose to play by the rules without punishing those who remained outside the boundaries in any credible way.

And the bill’s opponents made a very strong case that its passage would only lead to an even greater human flood across the border - a case no one on the pro-bill side ever even bothered to address substantively.

Finally he adds that

But the parlous decision to revive the dead immigration bill and fight for it, only to see it go down to defeat again, was an act of political suicide from which this White House will not recover.

That’s what we’ve been saying here for some time-I remember writing the headline for this Sam Francis piece six years ago: Suicide of the W? Bush’s Illegal Immigrant Amnesty - By Sam Francis, May 17, 2001. It’s taken that long for John Podhoretz to catch up.

Pew Research Recently published a poll that included several questions on immigration:

The latest national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted May 30-June 3 among 1,503 adults, finds a growing majority of Americans saying increased employer sanctions, as opposed to more border fences and patrols, can best reduce illegal immigration from Mexico. A 55% majority sees increased penalties on employers who hire illegal immigrants as the most effective way to stem cross-border immigration, up from 49% a year ago.

One interesting question this raises: how does the public feel about the $250 Billion in uncollected employer fines? Does the public want an amnesty of illegal employers-and if not, how does the public want these revenues used? How high does the public thing these employer fines really ought to be? I’ve previously estimated that they would need to be much higher than existing fines to be effective-but just enforcing the current $25,000 Maximum fine per violation would have an immediate and dramatic effect.

Less encouraging for VDARE.com readers was this item:

Overall, 63% of the public - and nearly identical numbers of Republicans, Democrats and independents - favor such an approach if illegal immigrants “pass background checks, pay fines and have jobs.

Years ago, I briefly worked for Andrew Greeley at the National Opinion Research Center. One of the things I learned from that experience is that whoever controls the questions controls the answers. In the Pew Poll, the idea of an amnesty gets less support than granting citizenship to illegal immigrants that pay a fine and pass a background check. One major feature that was omitted is how large that fine ought to be-and how it would be connected to the length of time in the US. Other polls have shown that most US citizens wouldn’t trade their citizenship for a Million dollars.

I suspect that if the US were to offer even a small buyout option to illegal immigrants–say $15,000 of the $25,000 collected from employer fines to those illegal immigrants that testify against their employers and return home, that many if not most illegal immigrants would leave voluntarily in an orderly fashion. That buyout option could be paid out gradually upon demonstration that they had in fact returned home and stayed there(say via biometric ATM machines located in Mexico and controlled by US authorities). What remains to be seen is how the public feels about using the revenues from employer sanctions for that purpose.

By contrast, those who are under age 30 overwhelmingly support both alternatives.

This tells me that immigration restriction advocates have a real education job to do among American youth–who are in fact among the most directly impacted by immigration. I would suggest we need education materials aimed at folks in high school or grade school on immigration. One problem is that the public school system is largely oriented toward indoctrinating a pro-immigration position. Teachers and administrators are largely charged with making the present situation work–and immigration is a major factor in justifying higher levels of educational budgets in many jurisdictions.

Mickey Kaus notes a new form of bipartisanship:

the coalition opposing the bill was slightly more bipartisan than the coalition favoring the bill.

Someone emailed him to point out that opposition to the bill came from

progressive Democrats who believe tightening up the labor supply is the best way to improve the fortunes of the lower and middle classes and … enforcement-first Republicans who are appalled to think that the border is not secure

This will be very familiar to VDARE.com readers, of course.