XDA

It was OK. Let's see what the Senate does with the requests of the President--the more fence the better to my mind. I see a big problem with the ID cards. He wants to issue them to foreign workers only. How do you do that? Isn't the problem that you don't know who the illegal immigrants are and that their papers, such as they are, aren't checked at the border? If you don't have to have a national ID to get or keep a job, are you going to punish any employer who employs someone who only speaks Spanish (or any other language except English with an American accent) and who doesn't have the foreign worker card? I thought it was going to be a "difficult-to-forge" national ID card. Where did that idea go?

I've been thinking about cracking down on employers for a long time. First a little background, and I choose that word on purpose.

I have been buying guns for about 25 years now. At first the form to fill out had only two questions. Now it has about 25, but for a very long time it has asked if you are a citizen. Once you have filled out the form (and showed ID), the gun dealer takes the form, calls the authorities and in a short time they know if you can buy a gun, including whether you are citizen or not. So either they are lying to the gun dealers and the authorities on the phone have no idea whether you are a citizen or not; or for $10.00 and a few minutes time, they can tell anyone who asks whether you are a citizen or not.

So there is a system in place which can quickly and cheaply confirm identity and tell if you are indeed a citizen. I know that there is another system which will tell the curious employer whether the SSN he or she has been given matches the name he or she has been given.

So there already are databases and ways to figure out whether someone is a citizen with a valid SSN that matches the prospective employee's name on the ID, but no one is enforcing the legal requirement to only employ citizens or work visa holders which laws are already on the books. Do we really need new laws to ignore?

Hugh Hewitt is pretty up about the speech. He thinks Bush threaded the needle to hit the needed middle ground which will please those of us who think the laws should be enforced and the border guarded, but without alienating the growing minority like they did in California a decade or so ago, sending them into the arms of the Democrats.

I'm still in the wait and see crowd. Fence first, IDs next. The rest is not in crisis mode.

OK. Julie Myers, whom Michelle Malkin just hates and thinks is incompetent, has just taken the wind out of Hugh's optimistic sails. Talk of the fence might just be political wanking, we now suspect.