As a legal immigrant for the last seven years on a visa that has no path to permanent residence, soon to expire, I watch the immigration debate with interest and at times fury. The immigration process is already a bureaucratic nightmare, adding twelve million more to rolls will surely overwhlem the process. Aside from this, the message the debate sends to those like me is one of profound injustice. This is almost never considered by anyone in the debate. The irony of the rhetoric about treating illegals justly and fairly by those who support the bill is not lost on the legal immigrant. I realize that I am here at the pleasure of the US, am not entitled to any rights to permanency, and am thankful for the opportunity to be here. While the bill will likely encourage more to come here illegally with the hope of being granted permanent status, it also punishes those who abide by the law. Perhaps I should buy a one way ticket to Tijuana and slink across the border.

Very well put, John. The sense of injustice suffered by those who worked the process legally must be palpable.

In addition, there'll be damage to those of us who are legal citizens of this country. Stanly Kurtz over at NRO writes this:

Supporters of this bill sell it as a compromise that will heal America’s divisions. I fear it’s quite the reverse. This bill is infuriating the public and undermining faith in government itself. You can see it in the polling on confidence in Congress and the President. If this bill passes, it’s going to aggravate and embitter politics for years to come. Passing a measure over such overwhelming opposition is like slapping the public in the face.

For the life of me I can't see the political benefit of supporting this bill ... yet support it they seem to.

We are facing a sad, sad period in the history of this great country.

This bill is about NAFTA and SPP. It's not some conspiracy theory.

The benefit to the left is a huge welfare state and to the corporate right is the ability to move production to places where labor and environmental protection laws are never enforced, and import cheap labor.

Export production. Import labor. Play the weaker state against the stronger state until it is undermined.

End-run the nation-state by using international arbitration courts to undermine national sovereighnty.

Not a conspiracy. The NAFTA corridor highway is scheduled to start being build in a couple months. It was routed through farmland and small towns so that resistance and press oversight would be limited.

The entire elite apparatus needs this bill to pass before construction can begin, because construction will call attention to what's going on.

That's what this is about. Believe it or don't.

For the life of me I can't see the political benefit of supporting this bill ... yet support it they seem to.

V.I. Lenin would ask, "Who whom?" "Who" - large corporate interests who want to permanently depress wages. The "whom" is the soon to be extinct American middle class. John is correct about the injustice to the legal immigrant. The more staggering injustice is that inflicted upon my friends who work in construction, most of whom have either taken second jobs now because they cannot compete with illegals, or have given up the job they liked, where they could work independently and be their own boss. Most have taken corporate - or worse yet government - jobs. Construction isn't "work Americans won't do" - it is work Americans won't do at unjust wages. I am a capitalist, I love the free market, but this is wrong. The flood of illegal labor which has resulted from the executive branch pointedly refusing to enforce the law is a de facto government manipulation of the labor market on behalf of the rich, against the American middle class and the American working class.

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public

While Adam Smith had cartel and monopoly in mind when he wrote this passage, surely it applies to the way corporate interests have united behind the perpetual serf labor act of 2007.

and if economic reasons for opposing this monstrous thing do not move you, there is this:

City Journal on Harvard social scientist's diversity research

Uh, isn't this post just a bit out of date? The Senate voted for cloture a couple of hours ago. Not only is the bill moving forward; we may also have lost our last chance to stop the monstrosity. (As the dismal Senate roll call suggests, the claim by Rahm Emanuel that the bill needs 70 Republican votes to pass the House is probably hogwash. Ted Kennedy has noted that if or when a Dem is president in '09, Congress will "fix" the parts of the bill "that don't work." In other words, even if some Republican amendments are adopted AND survive a dishonest House-Senate conference process, they'll just be repealed in two years.) I wish, by the way, that NLT had been on top of the immigration bill in the last week. It wasn't. This is not only an enormous political event, it's one that lends itself readily to regime-level, philosophical discussion. NLT offered conservatives little on the issue at the time it was most heated. National Review and Michelle Malkin carried the ball instead.

What is this "it is perceived ... as an amnesty bill." Why did you imply that the problem is one of perception. This is an amnesty measure. What we will have after this legislation passes are millions of people who were formerly illegal, now legal. That's amnesty. There's no getting around that. What's more, they will be free and clear of back taxes, they will be able to get instate college tuition as well as a host of other goodies that ordinary Americans never received, and were never close to receiving.

This bill isn't simply an amnesty, it's a pandering amnesty at that.

If these people were citizens, and Congress extended them this pandering goodie-bag, it would violate the equal protection provisions of the 14th Amendment. But inasmuch as they aren't citizens, Congress can get away pandering for their votes.

This is the most morally repugnant Congressional action of our lifetimes. It's absolutely revolting.

I think this qualifies as hate speech. When will we learn to accept the Other?

Yea, I'd better go back and read Edward Said's great opus.