Pine Belt Progressive

So much stuff is flying around about the immigration reform deal that I feel like I need to make three points about it before I run off to sleep.

1. It is not true that the contents of this bill are secret. If you don’t believe me, go to this page and scroll down until you see the heading Proposed Legislation. You can also get at least some of this stuff online from Library of Congress. It’s true that the Congress may, before passage of the final bill in both houses, make some changes that we don’t know about at this point. That’s called a conference and it happens with every bill that goes through Congress.

2. I have seen nothing about amnesty, from any informed person on any side of the debate. Labeling the proposed legislation “amnesty” is either ignorant or dishonest, depending on how much the person attaching the label actually knows about the proposed reforms. I don’t think anyone has seriously proposed an actual amnesty for undocumented immigrants since Ronald Reagan proposed one back in the 80s.

3. At least one newspaper is reporting that the legislation is going to create yet another surveillance/data mining mechanism and this new mechanism is going to apply to all workers in the U.S., citizens included. The explanation is rather lenghty, but here’s the bottom line:

As seen before in Washington DC, there may be collection of data for a stated purpose — in this case to fight illegal immigration — but it seems evident that the opportunity to collect of data on US citizens is not going to be passed up.

If the bill passes, the most basic and private personal information about where American citizens work, their past work history, their birthdays and social security numbers will be called in to the government every time they apply for a job.

Firedoglake has what I think is a fair analysis of the effects the proposed reforms will have on our immigration laws.