Mr. Steyn’s commentaries are both factually accurate and well sprinkled with biting humor, as is the case again today:

I don’t know whether this sham of a bill is dead or just resting “in the shadows” like a fine upstanding member of the Vampiric-American community. But, if it rises on the third night to stalk the land once more, I would advise its supporters to go about their work more honestly. First of all, the only guys “living in the shadows” are the aides of American senators beavering away out of the public eye to cook up this legislation and then present it as a fait accomplis to the citizenry (if you’ll forgive the expression). That is an affront to small-r republican government, and, if intemperate hectoring mediocrities like Trent Lott and Lindsay Graham don’t understand that, then their electors should give them a well-deserved lesson.
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America has an illegal immigration problem in part because it has a legal immigration problem. Anyone who enters the system exposes himself to an arbitrary, capricious, whimsical bureaucracy: For example, one of the little-known features of this bill is that in order to “bring the 12 million undocumented Americans out of the shadows,” millions of legal applicants are being hurled back into outer darkness. Law-abiding foreign nationals who filed their paperwork in the last two years would be required to go back to their home countries and start all over again. [emphasis added mine] Not only does this bill reward law-breaking, it punishes law-abiding.

The people who are truly “anti-immigrant” are the folks who want to send that immigrant from Slovenia or Fiji who applied in May 2005 back to the end of the line. But then “comprehensive immigration reform” is about everything but immigration, including subverting sovereignty and national security. Remember the 1986 amnesty? Mahmoud abu Halima applied for it and went on to bomb the World Trade Center seven years later. His colleague, the aforementioned Mohammad Salameh, was rejected but carried on living here anyway. John Lee Malvo was detained and released by U.S. immigration in breach of its own procedures and re-emerged as the Washington sniper. The young Muslim men who availed themselves of the U.S. government’s “visa express” system for Saudi Arabia filled in joke applications — “Address in the United States: HOTEL, AMERICA” — that octogenarian snowbirds from Toronto who’ve been wintering at their Florida condos since 1953 wouldn’t try to get away with. The late Mohammed Atta received his flight-school student visa on March 11, 2002, six months to the day after famously flying his first and last commercial airliner.

The image below is but one example of the poor screening of the 9/11 hijackers’ many entries into the United States. In our immigration agents’ defense, the 1996 US-VISIT law mandating a viable entry and exit records system had not been implemented and, as further proof of fraud, the current immigration bill calls for one even though DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff shelved the US-VISIT system in December 2006.