[MavKikiNYC]

This column predates the articles below, but it's an interesting perspective, and from Heminger of the WSJ no less:

Bastiat Knows What Frist Doesn't About Immigration
March 31, 2006; Page A16

It was in 1924 that the men of the U.S. Congress for the first time in the nation's history explicitly inserted the word "Immigration" in the title of a national law. Until then immigration laws were more precise in their purpose -- as in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. It may be considered progress of a sort that any immigration law likely to emerge from this Congress will not be titled the Mexican Exclusion Act of 2006.

Instead, the debate over the illegal presence of Mexicans and others with Hispanic surnames is said to be over "respect for the law." President Bush affirmed this in a recent radio address: "America is a nation of immigrants, and we're also a nation of laws."
"Respect for the law" is part of the American bedrock. As Alexis de Tocqueville rightly said, each voter indirectly contributes to the making of our laws, and "however irksome an enactment may be, the citizen of the United States complies with it . . . because it originates in his own authority." That is the high-road argument against the illegal Mexicans.

Another 19th-century Frenchman close to the hearts of American conservatives is Frederic Bastiat, who had a further thought: "The surest way to have the laws respected is to make them respectable." Is our immigration law "respectable"? Need you ask?
America is a nation of laws by now so numerous that it provides jobs for more lawyers per capita than any nation on earth. They serve as legal lifeguards, saving mostly honest citizens from the legal system's capricious undertow. Medical malpractice and asbestos are two areas of law for which "respect" is about zero. A law's existence requires compliance, but not respect.

Some of the anti-Mexican sentiment likely reflects an embarrassed awareness of our degraded laws, and so it has chosen to draw a line in the legal sand over immigration. That won't change the fact that U.S. immigration law is a disrespectable morass.
Swaths of American business openly ridicule the immigration law regulating so-called H-1B temporary visas for highly skilled non-citizen engineers and computer scientists. This controversial boom-and-bust employment morass exists because there is no rational system to give permanent, green-card status to these non-citizen workers and their families. Insisting on "respect" for a law that is doing damage to the nation's economy is cutting off one's nose to spite one's face. That is a bad habit.

The immigration law asking for respect is simply a system of legislated quotas, not much more than a numbers game. The people who play this game -- anyone seeking entry to the U.S. for a spouse, sibling, child or worker -- make monthly visits to the State Department's Web-based Visa Bulletin. Have a look; it actually resembles a bingo card.
Across the top of the grid are the major immigration source countries -- China, India, Mexico, the Philippines and a column for others. Down the left side are family-preference categories, such as 2A, spouses and children, who consist of "77% of the overall second preference limitation, of which 75% are exempt from the per-country limit." Each box, based on a numerical quota, lists the original application year of people nearing acceptance to enter. Filipino brothers and sisters who are now reaching the front of the line applied in 1983. The process has its own word for backlog: "retrogression." We should not be surprised or affronted that so many newcomers who've arrived via this bloodless, hostile bureaucracy then disappear into ethnic enclaves.

* * *

What exactly is driving anti-immigration sentiment? Breaking the law? Securing our borders? Terrorism? Medicaid outlays? Assimilation? Distaste for Spanish-speaking Mesoamericans? Talk radio? Of all the forces that now shape politics in the U.S, only one has primacy: the polls. The Wall Street Journal/NBC poll and others have concluded that most people oppose a path to permanent legal status of illegal immigrants already here. But why?

If you're John McCain, Bill Frist and maybe even Arizona Rep. J.D. Hayworth, who is most closely associated with the notion of building a Great Wall of Mexico, you're going to try to guess what's on voters' minds. Plumbing the mind of a congressman is beyond my ken, but the ideas of presidential candidates matter. The Frist plan, released on St. Patrick's Day, reflects these polls and presumably the GOP base. It would hammer employers of illegal immigrants with high fines and even jail time, and it offers no guest-worker provision, The McCain plan, essentially that which emerged this week from the Senate Judiciary Committee, breeds 14,000 new Border Patrol chasers but also requires the federal government to get into the guest-worker business, as it did from 1942 to 1964 with the bracero program, which rationalized worker flows.

No matter what the polls say, I think Mr. Frist's reading of the public mind is wrong, and Mr. McCain has it about right. Those polls produce about as much understanding of beliefs about immigration as did the analysis of the "moral values" vote after the 2004 election. In fact, I think the two phenomena are related.

Most Americans understand their heritage and do not want now to be "anti-immigrant." They don't want to be party to an 11-million-person round-up and deportation. What they want is a politics that takes seriously their anxieties, anxieties that involve not just immigrants but general unease about the direction of a turbulent, constantly changing U.S. culture, as in that 2004 presidential vote. So amid all that, along comes a major social movement -- 11 million "undocumented" workers. Assimilation? Heck, people who've lived here all their lives don't feel assimilated into their own culture anymore.

It's not a coincidence that the first push-back Immigration Act emerged in the Roaring Twenties, another period of abrupt social disruption and anxiety with heavy immigrant inflows from southern Europe. It may be too much to hope, but the purpose of political leadership in such times is to find a path toward our best lights rather than our darkest impulses. At the moment, Senator Frist of Tennessee isn't measuring up.