The now "dead" 2007 immigration bill tried to setup a Z class Visa. To get it immigrants who entered illegally before 1/1/7 had to file for it and pay a $1,500 processing fee and a $1,000 fine, learn English and Civics, hold a job, stay out of trouble, submit to biometric and health testing and renew their visa every four years. To upgrade to a green card, which is still the path to citizenship, they need to return home and pay an additional $4,000 fine. Illegals who entered after 1/1/7 are apparently out of luck.

The tough requirements seem fair to lawmakers but made the law unlikely to be followed by any but the most enterprising immigrants. This law would have created additional classes of illegals: a) those who don't apply, b)those whose applications are rejected and c)those who got here too late to apply.

One sticking point of the bill was the "probationary status" which is presumptively assigned to all 12 million illegals upon enactment of the bill. Considered "amnesty" by many this status provides a legal bridge that gives illegals a chance to establish legal status. Illegals are given a year to make application, within that year they are considered legal. This year of amnesty was a sticking point.

The law also called for money for a border fence and additional enforcement including more pressure on employers and a new employment verification database. Getting more security in place was considered a trigger for the law which supposedly means the other provisions don't go into place until the border is closed.

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Parts of this sound good. US immigration policy ought to encourage legal immigration by healthy, enterprising, law abiding folks who want to become American citizens or who want to work here for a few years before returning home. We've got plenty to do to compete with the Chinese, Indians, Europeans and other major populations of the world. We are going to need more people.

In practice expect it to be fouled up. The border won't be secured so new illegals will continue to arrive without a path to legality. Is anyone even wondering if there should be more legal immigration?  Expect the 1/1/7 trigger date to be changed, extended and possibly even discarded in the future. The application process will be jumbled and overwhelmed and deadlines extended. Expect to hear that the government wasn't prepared for so many applications. That INS or DHS had never handled a program this big or quick or complicated. Ineligibles will be approved and eligibles denied and expelled. The press will pick it up as more government bungling. Congressional investigations will be held. (Set your TIVO's now. It is going to happen. Remember this is the same DHS that orchestrated the response to Katrina.) The new biometric requirements, ID card and database will be attacked by civil libertarians as another step towards a universal identification scheme.

OK, take a deep breath. It didn't become law so it won't be fouled up.

So what can we do?

1. Make filing for resident worker status easier. Currently you have to hire a lawyer, file all kinds of documents.....make it as easy as getting a drivers license if you have a birth certificate and a clean criminal history and can pass a simple physical exam (it will takes more than an eye test to prove you aren't bringing in disease). Z doesn't really help here, the process is complicated if you arrive after 1/1/7 you are stuck and if you don't apply in time you are in another undefined sort of limbo.
   
2. Put most of the energy we are proposing for border control* into rooting illegals out of the workforce. If they don't or can't pass the simplified immigration rules in #1 above within 3 months of enactment, we really don't want them here. Enforce minimum wage, FICA and other tax rules rigorously with employers. This will level the playing field for all employers. Although there are some new fines and database requirements, the law has been in place for a long time and the government has not seen fit to enforce it.
   
3. Replace Jus Solis with a 20 year residency requirement plus high school equivalence for citizenship. Illegals whose children become citizens by virtue of being born in the US present a real dilemma under the current system. This would require a constitutional amendment to repeal the 14th.
4. One pundit recently remarked that foreign students (S-1 visa status) earning a PhD from any American University ought to be granted citizenship with their diploma. It's criminal to force these people to leave. We ought to encourage anyone from anywhere in the world with a degree in something useful (engineering, medicine, math, science, business, manufacturing almost any advance degree and many more skills) to come to the US.
   
5. We will have to and will want to provide some level of social safety net services for immigrants but deport any who become chronic drains on society. They'll pay into FICA/Medicare so should get those services (although I am in favor of abolishing those two altogether). Similarly they'll pay taxes for schools and ought to get public education (again we ought to abolish state sponsored public education). Public housing, food stamps, unemployment insurance and welfare are additional social safety net programs that we'd be better off without but will have to offer to all as long as we offer them to citizens.
   
6. Bands of chronically homeless, unemployed immigrants need to be rounded up and sent back to their country of origin. If they keep coming back we can keep sending them home. Catching them at the border won't be such a problem if they can't get work.
7. Immigrants convicted of a crime ought to be put in jail and then deported after they serve their sentences.
   

*Border Control is one of those buzzwords that keeps getting misused. Conservatives keep saying "border control" is a fundamental requirement of any sovereign nation and the US isn't protecting its borders. I think we are well protected against invasion by an army. Mexican tanks rolling across the Rio Grande bent on forcibly occupying Brownsville, El Paso or San Diego would meet a spectacular and unsuccessful fate. Protecting the borders against illegal immigration by people who want to get in to work is another matter altogether. Protecting it against drug gangs fueled by huge profits in the drug trade is yet another issue discussed elsewhere on this site.