Poison Pills

An immigration bill that creates millions of second-class citizens would be worse than no bill at all.

AS THE immigration bill steams through the Senate with surprising speed, it is acquiring a number of new and unpleasant amendments, mostly designed to placate people who don't really want an immigration bill at all. Some of the worst -- those that would have eviscerated the bill entirely or prevented immigrants from collecting Social Security owed to them -- have been voted down. Other noxious amendments, such as yesterday's proposal to make English the "national language," have been approved. None that has been accepted so far is a deal-breaker. But some changes would make the bill untenable. In particular, any amendment that would prevent illegal immigrants who live here now from coming out of the shadows is unacceptable -- as is any measure that creates a class of "lesser" Americans who live here but can never become citizens.

Specifically, that means that the rules designed to regularize the status of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States must allow all who qualify to embark on a path to citizenship if they want it, which not all of them will. Such people, whatever length of time they've been here, should pay a fine, pay back taxes and prove they are employed, as the bill already requires. The rule that some of them would have to return to a port of entry and reenter the country legally is also acceptable. But any amendment (and some are under discussion) that would require long-term residents to return home for more than a year and wait indefinitely to return to the United States is unrealistic: People cannot and will not leave jobs and families here for an uncertain outcome and will therefore not comply with the rules.

The same principle applies to the guest-worker visas described in the bill. It would be unfair and unprecedented to create a visa that bars its holders from obtaining American citizenship, ever. It is true that many potential workers would, polls show, welcome a chance to work here for a few years and then go home. But those who do integrate and aspire to citizenship must be allowed to retain that hope. Certainly it is fair to require them to learn English, be employed, pass a civics test. But deny them even a chance at citizenship, and you have the makings of a permanent underclass.

Finally, Congress ought to think hard on the question of who would enforce all of these new rules and issue these new visas. As it stands, the bill increases the number of border guards and enforcement officers. Although the immigration service would be better funded, thanks to the new fees and fines that would be paid, there is no acknowledgement that thousands of officials would be needed to read and approve new visa applications. The immigration bureaucracy already is overwhelmed: It is so slow and so prone to mistakes that it discourages people from coming here legally. It would be tragic for this bill, negotiated with such difficulty, to be unenforceable in practice because Congress has failed to give immigration and border authorities the resources they need.