Who needs external enemies when we have the U.S. Senate? The Real Risks of Amnesty

"Is the Gang of Eight willing to demand that local law enforcement start cooperating with ICE as a precondition of amnesty?
The Eight should also explain why they would allow illegal aliens with criminal records to legalize. Not one amnesty proposal has ever required a clean criminal record to qualify."

The Real Risks of Amnesty by Heather Mac Donald - City Journal
22 April 2013
American competitiveness and educational achievement are the worry, not an increased threat to national security.

The proponents of the Senate immigration amnesty bill are right about one thing: The recent Boston mayhem is largely irrelevant to immigration reform. It’s unrealistic to think that immigration officials should have divined the young Tsarnaev brothers’ future homicidal plans when the family’s asylum application was accepted in 2002 or even in 2007, when family members gained legal permanent-resident status. Perhaps the FBI’s interview with Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2011 for possible connections to Chechen terrorists should have stalled his younger brother Dzhokhar’s receipt of U.S. citizenship in 2012, but at least the Department of Homeland Security put Tamerlan’s own citizenship application on hold for further review, in light of the earlier FBI inquiry. If there was a government failure here, it would appear to have been the FBI’s, not the DHS’s, but more facts need to come out before reaching even that conclusion.

True, the asylum and refugee programs—a relatively small subset of legal immigration—suffer from fraud, but that fraud overwhelmingly consists of faking a basis for asylum, not covering up terrorist intentions. We can expect fraud to be an enormous problem in the proposed amnesty process, as it was in the 1986 amnesty, but it, too, will be largely concerned with manufacturing eligibility rather than with concealing terror plans. There is plenty to scrutinize in the Senate’s bill without alleging an exaggerated risk of terrorism, and it would be a mistake for skeptical senators to make national security a centerpiece of their inquiry. As horrific as every terror attack is, the incidence of domestic terrorism and the percentage of immigrants who commit it remain extremely low. The risks in the proposed amnesty law relate rather to America’s core immigration problem: the mass illegal entry of uneducated, unskilled aliens who pose no terror threat but who have a concrete effect on our educational and economic competitiveness.

Mickey Kaus has demolished the Senate bill’s central claim: that it makes border security a precondition for the granting of permanent-resident status. In fact, the enforcement goals consist of empty promises; nothing actually hangs on their achievement or requires that they ever be met. Immigrant advocate Frank Sharry candidly echoed Kaus’s analysis in the Wall Street Journal: “The triggers [for obtaining green cards] are based on developing plans and spending money, not on reaching that effectiveness, which is really quite clever.”

But the legislation’s most critical amnesty comes right away, before even the pretense of beefed-up security. Illegal aliens will get their illegal status removed six months after the bill is passed upon payment of $500. The formerly illegal aliens will be allowed to remain in the country legally, under so-called “probationary status,”  ...

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