One indicator of panic in crowds and individuals is an inability to seek or understand what’s in one’s own interest. The amazing plan from DHS on immigration is one such indicator. The Times editorial gets half the story right, but misses the other half. Recall that our current tested and practiced immigration policy has the following three pieces, a sort of sandwich that would seem imminently fissionable if not glued together by the middle part:

(1) Savage and heartless enforcement on a few illegal immigrants as criminals. A few. Not a lot; see (3). A few. Immigrants, not employers; see (3). Reread this until you understand it completely.

(2) Splendid and stentorian rhetoric, along with photo-ops of the occasional jobsite raid from (1), deploring criminals who take jobs from Americans. Talking points: criminals are brown, poor, and foreign, and they come here to luxuriate on welfare and crime amid our famous free everything. Those guys waiting at the curb near the Home Depot? They’re waiting for the welfare truck to come by and throw your money at them, not offering to spend the day digging in the sun for a few bucks and a glass of water! Don’t be fooled!

(3)

a. Assiduous protection of cheap and docile labor for employers who would prefer not to pay what Americans would charge, especially in a few industries like agriculture, food processing, and hospitality. Illegal status is very important to the cheap part of this. Also the docile part.

b. Assiduous protection of services and traditions at the heart of the American way of life, including pool cleaning, staying in nice hotels, eating out, home renovation, child care from nannies, gardening, and housecleaning. If these aren’t cheap and abundant, it’s as bad as raising taxes on the rich.

The poor souls in DHS, apparently unhinged by anticipating the ’08 elections, or some new horror from an IG or a Hill committee hearing, have completely forgotten (3), and worse, put a serious enforcement program into the hands of civil servants in the Social Security Administration, an army that will be as hard to call back as the sorcerer’s apprentice’s brooms. It’s been so long since the last helpful political briefing that they have also forgotten that the employers in 3a and consumers in 3b are W’s people! They’re Republicans! Guys, we deplore illegal immigrant workers when Rupert needs a story - maybe even abuse a few; we don’t actually deprive ourselves of them!

With the loss of the Weekly World News*, I have to pick up the mantle in my own small way. This can only be a virus unleashed into the Rovian cerebronet by an Al Q’aeda wonk, that’s blown out neural circuits all over Washington and is spreading up K Street as we speak.

*No immigration angle, but don’t miss this hilarious Peter Carlson piece in the WaPo.

This isn’t the end of the story, of course. This was just cloture on the motion to proceed with the bill. There’s another one coming on passing the bill itself, and a third on the conference report.

Baucus, Bayh, Byrd, Conrad, Dorgan, Landrieu, McCaskill, Rockefeller, Stabenow, Tester were the nine Democratic “Noes.” Among the Democrats, only Boxer, Pryor, and Webb changed from “No” last time to “Yea” this time. Bayh and Conrad switched the other way; I have no idea what that’s about.

The sound you hear in the background is Republican Senators’ arms being twisted until they groan. Last time, there were only seven Republican “Yeas”: Graham, Hagel, Lugar, Martinez, McCain, Specter, Voinovich. Today, there were fifteen switches: Bennett, Bond, Burr, Coleman, Collins, Craig, Domenici, Ensign, Gregg, Kyl, Lott, McConnell, Murkowski, Snow, and Stevens. Brownback, Coburn, and Enzi, who didn’t show last time &#8212 effectively a “No,” since the motion needs 60 votes to pass &#8212 all voted “Yea.”

Barusso, the new guy from Wyoming, voted “No.” Only Johnson didn’t show.

I guess if you’d asked me to bet I would have bet on exactly sixty votes for cloture, on the theory that the leadership on both sides wanted it to pass but that passing it would require getting some Senators to go along who for electoral reasons would have preferred not to, and that the leadership would therefore buy or coerce as few of those reluctant players as possible. But that’s not what happened. That suggests that the muscle was coming largely from the outside, and that some at least of the Republican switchers decided they were more afraid of the Chamber of Commerce than they were of the nativists.

Maybe in the long run Bush/Rove/McCain/McConnell are right that the GOP can’t afford, for its own long-term health, to be on the wrong side of history on this issue. But in the short run, it seems to me this is nothing but good news for the Democrats. I’m not really ready to predict that the GOP will pull itself apart on this issue they way the Whigs did on Abolition in the 1850s or the Democrats did on Civil Rights during the Second Reconstruction (or as the English Liberals did on Home Rule), but stranger things have happened. The fury on immigration in Wingnuttistan is something to behold.

What’s more likely than not, however, is a bunch of nasty Republican Senate primaries and a demobilized Republican base in 2008: as long as we don’t give them Hillary Clinton to re-mobilize themselves with.

Footnote Anyone got a theory on Brownback’s “Yea” vote? It seems an odd decision for someone who is trying to be the official wingnut candidate for President. Maybe he figured that if McCain continues to collapse he might be the only remaining pro-immigration candidate.

Looks as if someone neglected to drive a stake through the heart of the immigration bill. I had been betting that the Republicans would choose to let go, hoping (with the help of useful idiots like David Broder) to blame it on the Democrats. But no: it’s back.

Fine with me. The predictable result will be to continue the process of tearing the Republican Party apart. (When Trent Lott starts denouncing “talk radio,” I smile.) Their version of the Netroots really, really hates this bill. Or, you might say, their version of the netroots really, really hates, and this bill is a good focus for that.

GWB and his allies seem to be making two calculations.

1. They’re afraid of replicating the disastrous mistake of California’s Republicans, who seem to have turned themselves from a serious contender for power to a permanent minority by exploiting the immigration issue (“They … keep … coming!”) in the mid-90s and thus losing the Latino vote for a generation. (Tom Edsall reports that Latino evangelicals, a fast-growing group where the GOP was making gains nationally, have discovered that blood is thicker than bullsh*t and are willing to walk away if the Republicans keep playing footsie with the nativists.)

2. Their paymasters in the business sector really want this one, and will know precisely whom to blame if the bill dies after three-quarters of the Democrats in the Senate voted for it and three-quarters of the Republicans against it.

Some of them, including the President, also believe in the substance of the bill.

All of the amendments should be regarded as shadow-play. The bill still has to get through the House. If it does, I predict that Pelosi and Reid will imitate their Republican predecessors and appoint Democratic conferees who meet in secret and vote in lockstep for a “clean” bill, bearing only an accidental resemblance to whatever passed the two chambers. That bill will be slightly more pro-immigrant and anti-business than the current compromise, but not so much so that the White House will walk away from it. (Apparently there’s now talk of some form of ID with encoded biometrics, which would make employer sanctions a real possibility and therefore prevent a new wave of illegals from coming to work and waiting for the next amnesty. Employers would hate that, but probably not enough to turn away from the overall deal.)

That scenario would give Congressional Republicans a final choice between terminally pissing off the Latinos and the Chamber of Commerce on the one hand and outraging the Republican activist base (while handing a victory to Reid, Pelosi, and Ted Kennedy) on the other. Will that be strychnine, Senator, or arsenic?

My bet now (and since I haven’t been right yet on this issue, I ought to be due) is that we’ll have a bill on the President’s desk this year.

It’s really fortunate that I don’t have a conspiratorial turn of mind. If I did, not only would I believe that Dick Cheney is an al Qaeda “sleeper” whose mission was to promote global jihad by making the United States a pitiful, helpless, and hated giant, but that Karl Rove is actually under the control of Rahm Emmanuel. Has Rove done anything he should not have done, or left undone anything that he should have done, to destroy the Republican Party? Personally, I hope to be there when he gets out of prison and hand him a nice bouquet.

As to Reid: from where I sit, he looks to me like a seriously misunderestimated figure. The Republicans are eager to hang themselves, and on current form Reid is the rope merchant to end all rope merchants.

The GOP Presidential race seems to be getting nasty early:

In the case of Governor Romney, you know, maybe I should wait a couple of weeks and see if it changes, because it’s changed in less than a year from his position before. And maybe his solution will be to get out his small-varmint gun and drive those Guatemalans off his lawn.

Eleventh Commandment? Maybe McCain is one of those Biblical literalists who think there are only ten.

That’s the way it looks.

Turns out the high-tech folks prefer hiring indentured servants under H-1B visas to having to hire green-card holders who can walk if someone offers them more money. The low-tech folks are worried that there will be fewer low-skilled immigrants for them to underpay if a point system gives preference to those with high skills. And when they agree to enforcement agaist illegal hiring in the workplace, they didn’t mean, y’know, enforceable enforcement.

Those of us who think that the bill as proposed will put upward pressure on wages compared to the status quo stand, I think, vindicated. If the bill really meant more hordes of Mexicans and Central Americans flooding across the border, the National Restaurant Association would be for it.

But without bribes &#8212 sorry, that’s “campaign contributions” &#8212 and pressure from the business sector, there’s no reason for Republican legislators to defy their own base and help the Democratic-controlled Congress rack up a major accomplishment. Mitch McConnell has already signalled he’s going to run a slow-down. This might not work.

On the bright side, if the employers aren’t playing, then there’s no reason not to ditch the guest-worker provisions in conference and try to pass a bill that doesn’t make the rest of us need to hold our noses.

Update One more reason not to hate this bill: it drives the right-wing hateroots batsh*t crazy and if passed could launch a wingnut jihad against the GOP. One, two, many Lincoln Chafees!

Harry Reid seems to be a very clever fellow. He’s scheduled debate on immigration the last two weeks of this month. There’s a bipartisan group of Senators working out a new deal, now that the White House has backed off from last year’s model and is proposing something much more Tancredish. But no deal has been reached.

So Reid is simply going to move the bill that passed the Senate last year, with 23 Republican votes. And some of the key GOP players who voted for, and even co-sponsored it, last year, are threatening to vote against it, or even filibuster it, this year. That includes not only Senator Straight Talk (who speaks with forked tongue) but Mel Martinez, installed by Bush as RNC Chair specifically to keep from losing the Latino vote, along with Lindsay Graham and Arlen Specter.

Are they going to look silly filibustering against something they sponsored last year, or what?

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, a new CNN poll reports small but noticeable majorities against a border fence and against guest-workers, and an 80-20 majority for “Creating a program that would allow illegal immigrants already living in the United States for a number of years to stay in this country and apply for U.S. citizenship if they had a job and paid back taxes.” Tell me again about the huge nativist wave that’s going to drown the Democrats unless they toughen up on “illegal immigration”? But it looks to me as if “paying back taxes” must be doing some of the work here, so every pro-normalization Democrat ought to add it to the mantra, along with “learning English.”

A friend from Washington called to give me the heads-up: Congressional Democrats are about to make a move on immigration. With friendly fire from the Tancredo wing pinning down Bush and McCain, the prospects look lousy, but they’re going to give it the old college try. And they’re prepared to make some significant concessions, including an English-language requirement for achieving legal status, a major tightening of of “family reunification,” and some sort of national ID card.

The Democrats’ only hope of getting enough Republican votes to get something through is the threat that the Tancredo wing may be doing to the Republicans nationally what the Pete Wilson ’94 re-election campaign did for Republicans in California: make the GOP a semi-permanent minority party. They can also (as Hillary Clinton did at the California State Democratic Convention) try to raise the salience of the national-security implications of the current mess. Susan Ginsburg has argued that we can accomplish most of what we need to in terms of hampering terrorist mobility without addressing larger immigration issues, but there’s at least facial plausibility to the claim that having 12 million people in the country illegally constitutes a security threat.

It seems to me that the anti-immigration forces have a legitimate point that a normalization program without effective controls on continued inflows is asking for a repeat of Simpson-Mazzoli. But I don’t believe for a second that we can fix the program by controlling border crossing; as a former DEA once said about drug interdiction, if we build a fifty-foot wall around the country, the smugglers will by fifty-one-foot ladders.

So controlling illegal immigration means making it harder for illegal immigrants to get jobs. The best way to do that is to make it more dangerous for employers to hire them. That in turn requires that employers (1) be able to tell who’s eligible to work and who isn’t and (2) have a good chance of getting caught if they hire someone who isn’t eligible.

It’s technically feasible &#8212 though it would be expensive &#8212 to give employers a foolproof means of checking work-eligibility, even without going as far as giving everyone a personal picture ID. Compile a numbered list of those eligible to work (citizens and aliens with visas that permit employment) including some easily-readable biometric data (fingerprint or equivalent). Anyone on that list can get a card containing a digitized form of the biometric data and an encrypted number that matches the number on the list. When I show up for a job interview, I show my employment card, and the employer first compares the card with me by seeing if my fingerprint (or whatever) matches the data on the card and then queries the central data-base to find out whether the number on the card corresponds to an entry on the list. (Employers too small to have their own fingerprint-scanning equipment could buy the checking service commercially or get it from a state employment agency.)

Once that was in place (we’re talking years and billions of dollars) no employer could reasonably complain about having hired an illegal unknowingly.

At that point we could ratchet up the penalties: a $50,000 fine should do the trick. But harsh penalties don’t help unless they’re actually collected, and the way things are now the illegal employee has every incentive to keep the employer’s illegal behavior a secret. So we need an incentive for workers to rat out their employers. But what could be simpler? If you’re not eligible to work, and you can prove that someone has employed you illegally, you get a green card. Suddenly illegal aliens discover that they can’t find work, because employing an illegal means putting yourself in his power.

All that seems fairly obvious, but so far none of the players seems to be interested. What I’m worried about is that instead we’ll get a “comprehensive” bill that makes the normalization process contingent on the success of border controls which will never succeed, while including indentured servant (pardon me, “guest-worker”) provisions for the benefit of employers unwilling to offer wages Americans are willing to take. The result will be to make the current undocumented population worse off without solving the security problem or much reducing the inflow. (Life in the U.S. as an undocumented worker could get much, much worse than it now is and still be better than life in much of Central America.)

I’d much rather have no bill at all than a bill like that, and a bill like that is what I think we’re likely to get if we get any bill at all. So I’m not a fan of the decision to push the issue forward. But the Democrats don’t have much choice; if there’s going to be a train wreck, it has to be clear to the voters, and especially to pro-immigrant voters, that it was the Republicans who spiked the rails.