Mark Krikorian on Immigration on National Review Online

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZjZkOTYzMDBjZTk3YTNmOTU1ZDRjNDQ1ZmNkMzhhMDc=

FYI,,I believe the date is wrong

Amnesty, R.I.P.
A bad deal dies.
June 8,2007
By Mark Krikorian

How could the Senate amnesty bill have possibly failed? It was supported by the president, the majority party and prominent members of the minority, plus Big Business, Big Labor, Big Media, and Big Religion.
And yet the motion Thursday night to end debate and move to a final vote on the bill was soundly rejected, failing to garner even a majority, let alone the necessary 60 votes.

The reason was simple — public outrage.

Immigration is one of those areas where public and elite views differ widely (for instance, see here and here). But most of the time that doesn’t really matter, because immigration seldom ranks high enough in voter concerns for politicians to take much notice. This gives lawmakers and bureaucrats a relatively free hand to cater to the preferences of businesses and racial-identity groups and anti-borders activists in promoting ever-higher immigration levels and ever-looser enforcement.

But that only works when you’re pushing bills or administrative measures that are relatively narrow and targeted. Most people have no idea what H1b visas are, let alone whether they should be increased or decreased. The attorney general’s decision to extend Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of Central American illegal aliens is something most reporters — let alone ordinary readers — don’t understand, and thus receives little scrutiny in the media.

The accumulation of such small measures has a large effect, but it’s hard for non-specialists to see, and so it continues, like the proverbial frog sitting still in a pot of water while the temperature approaches boiling.

But when you assemble a huge “comprehensiveâ€