Nobody Cares About Amnesty

To read today's Washington Post [1], you'd think the debate over the immigration bill is between Amnesty and No Amnesty.

The paper asserts that "the specter of amnesty has persistently haunted the debate -- and could jeopardize the bill's chances for passage" and "Opponents are able to successfully invoke amnesty...".

But if anti-immigrant forces are successfully invoking amnesty, then most Americans would be against allowing illegal immigrants to stay in America.

They're not.

According to CNN polls from this year and last, 80% of Americans support [2] "allow[ing] illegal immigrants already living in the United States for a number of years to stay in this country and apply for U.S. citizenship if they had a job and paid back taxes."

That's far more lenient than the proposed penalties most immigrant advocates would support as part of comprehensive reform.

And the CBS/NY Times polls, also from this year and last, find slightly more than 60% back [2] "giv[ing illegal immigrants] a chance to keep their jobs and eventually apply for legal status" over "deport[ing them] back to their native country."

This is after more than a year of nativist voices dominating the airwaves and screeching about amnesty. Their argument has been forcefully made, and the voters simply aren't buying what the wannabe border militiamen are selling.

The immigration deal may well fail to clear the Congress. And the implacable nativist crowd may well try to claim credit for any demise, by conning spinnable outlets like the Washington Post.

But do not believe that successful immigration reform requires sucking up to the few very loud people who are apoplectic about amnesty.

In fact, if the Senate wheeler-dealers hadn't pandered to the nativists -- by diminishing the importance of family in admitting immigrants and creating a new temporary worker program with no chance to earn citizenship -- they might have crafted a bill with a chance of actually fixing the broken immigration system, and have garnered strong support from the vast majority of Americans that believe in humane, practical reform.

UPDATE: Over at DMIBlog [3], check out all the ways senators are trying to make the flawed immigration deal even worse.