Will simply demonstrates (yet again) that there is no logical reason to import so many low-skilled people. There never has been a good reason to leave the border so open other than selfish interests on the part of business and the Democratic Party machine.

If this bill passes, it simply reinforces the notion that America has become an empire run by a patrician class. Our rules consider us cattle, and what does it matter if they decide to change breeds?

Does anyone assert a "universal right to American citizenship"?

Are we a nation, or are we a market-place?

Are we a community of shared values, shared language and a shared history, or are we a free floating market-place of ideas, beliefs, values, morals and money?

This issue is truly about American sovereignty and American Exceptionalism. {As an aside, but advancing the same point, The Law of the Sea Treaty, a liberal dream for decades, Bush has recently promised to sign, after Reagan explicitly rejected the thing way back in the early '80s}.

I'm stunned there are members of the GOP who think this bill anything other than a flat-out disaster, a disaster for the country, a disaster for the nation, a disaster for the Grand Old Party.

The Party of Lincoln fought to make sure that the nation was one. This bill is an attempt to make us a market-place of the many.

I don't want to live in some market-place. I live in the last, best hope of man on Earth, I live in a country of Valley Forge, Gettysburg, Princeton and Antietam. My father, my forefathers didn't fight, suffer and die for me to stand idly by while the country is transformed into some nightmarish, multicultural mishmash of competing claims, competing whines, competing entitlements.

The challenges that are going to face this country in the coming decades will be of a size, of a complexity that will daunt many. The America that will exist in the wake of this bill will not be an America made more ready for those challenges, but will be an America rendered weak by the entitlement battles that this bill will surely engender. We will start tending towards European spending priorities, and as you've all noticed, Europe has no military, no air force, no navy to speak of. Even if they wanted to contribute in this war on muslim mayhem, they wouldn't have the means. Our British friends for instance, don't even have an Army of 75,000 men. All of their spending, all of the funding flowing from their enormous tax burden, it all goes to maintain their tottering welfare states.

The natural consequence of this bill will see defense spending decline, an American foreign policy reflect that reduced power, and will also see an American foreign policy delivering over more and more issues to the UNSC for resolution. Which means inaction, which means enhanced dangers, enhanced perils.

Which means a reckoning, sure to come.

Writes WSJ: One basic flaw in the Heritage analysis is that, as a study by the Immigration Policy Center points out: "The vast majority of immigrants are not eligible to receive any of these [welfare] benefits for many years after their arrival in the United States.

The editors conveniently overlook the fact that about 12 million immigrants also aren't even eligible to be here. Yet here they be. So much for eligibility.

Good point, Melinda. And those people ARE drawing various kinds of benefits. Just go check out any ER in Houston or LA if you doubt it.

Ohhh, so much hatred....

Yet another nome de troll -- you need to slow down, Scanman...you'll use up all your good ones.

Why do you fear the Other?

John Jay, the Federalist Papers.

With equal pleasure I have as often taken notice that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people--a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.

Undoing this situation seems to be a pressing concern for Americas ruling class.

9: Yes, a rarely-discussed quotation from The Federalist.