HOW do you slip legislative poison past a U.S. senator? Bury it on page 302 of a bill. The Senate's Democratic and Republican leaders yesterday announced a compromise on an immigration bill - with some details still to be worked out. But details that may continue from the bill passed out of the Judiciary Committee should definitely be deal-breakers.Like that surprise hidden on page 302 - which would replace the country's entire bench of experienced immigration judges with pro-immigration advocates.
With a few exceptions, today's immigration judges (who serve for life) are dedicated to enforcing the law, and they do a difficult job well. This bill forces all immigration judges to step down after serving seven years - and restricts replacements to attorneys with at least five years' experience practicing immigration law.
Virtually the only lawyers who'll meet that requirement are attorneys who represent aliens in the immigration courts - who tend to be some of the nation's most liberal lawyers, and who are certainly unlikely as a class to be fond of enforcing immigration laws.
It gets worse. Immigration judges are now appointed by the attorney general - whose job it is to see to it that laws are enforced. The Senate bill gives that power to a separate bureaucrat, albeit one directly appointed by the president, making immigration courts more susceptible to leftward polarization.
The second nasty surprise? Just before the committee approved the bill on the evening of March 27, Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) offered the "DREAM Act" as an amendment. It passed on a voice vote. The DREAM Act is a nightmare. It repeals a 1996 law that prohibits state universities from offering in-state tuition rates to illegal aliens. The principle, of course, is that no illegal alien should be entitled to receive a taxpayer-subsidized benefit that out-of-state U.S. citizens can't get. But the committee's bill allows illegals to be treated better than those U.S. citizens on tuition.
The bill also gives an amnesty to the nine states (including New York) that have been flouting the '96 law, two of which (California and Kansas) are now facing lawsuits (I'm a counsel to the plaintiffs in both cases).
The third nasty surprise lies in what the bill fails to do. The measure envisions a massive amnesty for illegal aliens now in the country - but doesn't give the Citizenship and Immigration Service (CIS) the personnel or infrastructure to implement the amnesty.
In March, the General Accounting Office (GAO) issued a scathing report on the CIS's inability to effectively detect immigration fraud. The last time we enacted a major amnesty, in 1986, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (the CIS's predecessor agency) processed some 3 million amnesty applications from illegal aliens. It found 398,000 cases of fraud - and missed thousands more. Now CIS may have to implement an amnesty four times larger.
Yet CIS already faces a backlog of several million applications for immigration benefits. And the GAO found that CIS managers pressure staff into "meeting production goals" by approving applications quickly - which means that fraud goes undetected. Adding millions of amnesty applications can only make things worse. And the latest Senate "compromise" - giving immediate amnesty only to aliens who've been in the country for five years or more - makes the process even more complex and fraud-prone, as illegals use fake documents to "prove" long-term residence.
In 1986, the terrorist Mahmud "The Red" Abouhalima fraudulently got amnesty as a seasonal agricultural worker (in fact, he was a New York cabbie). That status allowed him to travel to Afghanistan for terrorist training - which he later used as one of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers.
Terrorists know how to game the system. Janice Kephart, former counsel to the 9/11 Commission, released a study last year on how easily terrorists obtain immigration benefits. Of 94 alien terrorists in the United States, she found that 59 were successful immigration frauds. That includes six of the 9/11 hijackers.
The Senate bill does nothing to address this problem - while throwing a massive new load on the bureaucracy. A new amnesty will almost certainly ensure that more terrorists gain the legal right to walk our streets.
They will no doubt show their appreciation by attacking innocent Americans. And that will be the nastiest surprise of all.