Well the Hagel Amnesty Amendment is scheduled to be voted on at 9:30 this morning. The news reports this morning were talking about the compromise having some cracks forming last night.

Another thing that warmed my heart is the fact that Sen. Frist’s main office lines were busy (typical for the Majority Leader) AND his local offices are going to voicemail AND the voicemail boxes at each of his local offices are FULL. I sounds like America has spoken… we’ll know in a few hours if the Senators were listening.

Well the Senate is already patting themselves on the back for their big compromise that will only grant Amnesty to 80% of the illegal immigrants in our country that have been here at least 2 years. Unfortunately, any part of the remaining 20% smart enough to claim they’ve been here at least two years will also be granted amnesty since we have no record of when they entered the country. So what is being celebrated? Apparently the belief that enough spin, smoke and mirrors have been created to fool the American people into thinking that this bill/amendment isn’t amnesty.

The surprising thing is that the measure hasn’t actually been voted on, leaving a scant amount of time for the voters to express their displeasure before shifting focus on the next election cycle. I myself have repeated called, faxed, and emailed both of my Senators. Hopefully they will listen – overlooking 11 MILLION law breakers is out of control.

You have until the vote tomorrow to make yourself heard.

• Senators seal immigration deal

The thing that I can’t get over is the fact that the Senate seems afraid of this future voting block of illegals made citizens. The crazy thing is tha the only way they become citizens is if the Senate caves into them. Strange.

Well the Senate is trying it’s best to wuss out and find a compromise that makes everyone happy. The latest idea is a three tier system.

• Illegals here over 5 years can stay and become citizens
• Illegals here between 2-5 years can become citizens but most do so from a “port of entry” (The nearest international airport or water port)
• Illegals here under 2 years are deported

Unfortunately, the middleground is unacceptable to many on both sides of the issue. The anti-amnesty crowd doesn’t see a big difference between forgiving 11 Million lawbreakers and forgiving 9 Million lawbreakers. Meanwhile the pro-illegal immigrants held a protest this week demanding voting rights for illegal immigrants. Why become a citizen of the US when you can just demand all the benefits and stay loyal to your homeland. We don’t let LEGAL immigrants vote… why would we let ILLEGAL ones vote.

One other thing to point out. If these illegals are “living in the shadows” and we know nothing about them… (except that there are 11 Million of them) How do we establish how long they have been in the country to know what tier they belong in??? I know we’ll just ask ’em.

So one of the big arguments for amnesty is that there is no practical/realistic way to deport 11 million illegals. Let’s look at all of the reasons this is a bad argument…

(Before we start I think it bears mentioning that we don’t know who these illegals are, where they’re at, or what they’re doing but we DO know that there are 11 million of them.)

• First of all everyone acts like if we pass immigration enforcement reform we’ll have to round everyone up and ship them home in the following 24 hour period. While that makes a great action TV show… Deportation would only occur when we actually catch illegals. This alone would be a fundamental shift from current enforcement. Today most illegals are either released outright or released and told to come back in a week or two to be deported (shockingly few show up)
• Others claim it would crush our economy to displace so many workers… Again normal enforcement would only slowly reduce these workers allowing market forces to act and shift workers and labor rates the same why it has for our 200+ year history.
• I?m quite confident that if 10 days from now, 11 million people decided not to pay their taxes that the government would – somehow – find a way to deal with THAT problem.
• Now there is a compromise amnesty bill being floated that allows any illegal living here more than 5 years to be able to stay, but those here less than 5 years – about 40% – would be deported. OK, so somehow deporting 11 million people is crazy but 5 million – that?s a workable plan. Yeah.