RealClearPolitics - Articles - A Watershed Moment on Immigration

The reason is that the Democrats — and Bush — are out of line with public opinion on the issue. That became clear as the Senate debated a comprehensive immigration bill in May and June. Most Republicans and many Democrats, in the Senate and among the public, turned against the bill. Supporters of the bill tended to ascribe that to something like racism: They just don’t like having so many Mexicans around.

But if you listened to the opponents, you heard something else. They want the current law to be enforced. It bothers them that we have something like 12 million illegal immigrants in our country. It bothers them that most of the southern border is unfenced and unpatrolled. It bothers them that illegal immigrants routinely use forged documents to get jobs — or are given jobs with no documents at all.

You don’t have to be a racist to be bothered by such things. You just have to be a citizen who thinks that massive failure to enforce the law is corrosive to society.

To read Barone’s drivel today, you’d think he understood all along how America felt about illegal immigration. Not quite hardly. I wrote the following nearly two years ago, and I haven’t changed my mind one bit about Barone since:

Daily Pundit » Are You All Nuts?

Barone, a big booster of immigration “normalization” (amnesty) is a prince of conventional wisdom, and as such, he is listened to with rapt attention, even when he is as clueless as those who mimic him in tones of hushed awe.

The guy could hardly have been more wrong two weeks before the 2006 election, and people are taking his prognostications about 2008 as gospel two years in advance of the actual event?

Man, I need to find a way to buy me some of that.

Yeah. George Bush and Karl Rove, political geniuses. The Clintons, saviors of the Democratic Party. And Mike Barone, political savant extraordinaire.

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