Forcing an Elephant Through a Straw

In the last few days I've gone back and forth on the immigration reform bill being thrown about in the Senate. Our Patriarch of the Airwaves, Hugh Hewitt has been staunchly against it and then the Wall Street Journal came out with an editorial in favor of it. Was it halfway decent or a total sell-out? Mark Steyn just answered the question for me.

As for the notion that dumping a population the size of four mid-size European Union nations into the lap of America's arthritic "legal immigration" (please, no tittering; apparently, there is still such a thing) bureaucracy will lead to tougher enforcement and rigorous scrutiny and lots of other butch-sounding stuff, well, if that were the case, there wouldn't be a problem in the first place. You can declare that "illegal" now mean "legal" very easily; to mandate that "incompetent" now means "competent" is a tougher proposition.

The immigration bill suffers from the same malady as my organization's line management. It has divorced theory from reality. In theory, you can absorb 30 million people with some hope of maintaining a structured process to deal with the paperwork.

In theory, you can force an elephant through a straw with the proper assumptions of molecular elasticity of the straw.

An elephant.

Some straws. They look pretty sturdy. Let's try it!
Our immigration bureaucracy has shown that it is not capable of handling immigration flows 1/50th this size. Clearly, it can't handle anything this large. The whole concept is flawed until you prove you can do it on a smaller scale. The whole bill is a total disaster for the reasons Mark enumerates in his article. Read the whole thing.

Then call your senators and oppose it.

Update: Powerline has a great take on the bill as well.