At Forbes, Shikha Dalmia of Reason Magazine offers "Obama Can't Handle Immigration Reform/The leading proposal will curtail liberties without making life better for immigrants" [1]. The article shows yet again why she isn't a credible source on this issue, at least for patriotic Americans. Those who put libertarian ideology or corporate profits ahead of the interests of U.S. citizens are quite welcome to consider her a credible source.

In the article she comes out against the Graham-Schumer amnesty plan due to, among other things, its national ID card component. [2] She also suggests waiting a few years before beginning the push for comprehensive immigration reform. That's good, but for the rest she shows that her loyalties don't lie with U.S. citizens but with her globalist ideology or something else:

...The fundamental problem with America's immigration system is that it forces Americans to justify to their government why they want to bring someone into the country, instead of requiring the government to justify to them why they can't. Uncle Sam is less gatekeeper, more social engineer. Instead of focusing on keeping out those who pose a genuine security or public health risk -- the only immigration policy consistent with ideals of limited government -- it is driven, among other things, by a need to manage labor market flows and the national demographic makeup... And Uncle Sam gives each country an annual quota for green cards, because, otherwise, who knows, America could be overrun by colored hordes from China and India, upsetting its white, Anglo-Saxon character...

The U.S. doesn't really have a "white" character, and it certainly doesn't have an "Anglo-Saxon" character unless that's Dalmia's description for everyone who's white. Dalmia - just like those on the far-left - would invite the world to come here in part in order to show that we aren't a racist country. Her implied definition of whether someone is a risk is highly flawed and would allow foreign countries - Mexico, China, India and some others - to in effect colonize parts of the U.S.: sending us millions of people in order to gain or just coincidentally gaining political power inside the U.S. Dalmia - the supposed libertarian - would use force (deception and trickery) to take political power away from U.S. citizens.

Any reform bill worthy of the name therefore has to fundamentally shift the orientation of America's immigration policy so that it is driven less by arbitrary bureaucratic fiat and more by the genuine needs of the American economy and people.

The American people have spoken out in poll after poll that they want immigration either kept at the same level or reduced. Perhaps Shika Dalmia used "genuine" in the sense that those dummies don't know what they need, and libertarians just need to impose the correct way on them.

...in order to appease Rush Limbaugh and the rest of the anti-amnesty crowd, the [Schumer-Graham] bill will not only impose onerous fines on them for breaking an anti-freedom, irrational law; it will also force them to stand in the back of the green-card-line that for many categories has a decades-long wait.

It's unclear whether she thinks just our immigration laws that prevent millions of low-skill workers from coming here are "irrational" or whether she's against immigration laws in general. The great majority of Americans would disagree with the former, and almost every American would disagree with the latter. What Dalmia wants would go against the wishes of the great majority of Americans; her libertarian scheme would have to be imposed through force of one kind or another, whether physical force or just deception.

She is however right about the "decades-long" part, but what she isn't mentioning is discussed on the immigration line page: there really isn't a "back" to the line since new people are joining it all the time. That means that illegal aliens would make it more difficult for future legal immigrants. Since we can only process so many people at a time - and the USCIS is unable to deal with their workload as it is - one wonders what Dalmia would have us do: do little or no checking at all of whether illegal aliens are a security risk? Since illegal aliens would have to be processed in some way, the only logical explanation is that Skihia Dalmia wants us to simply wave them through. Needless to say, that would allow thousands of criminals to get on the path to citizenship. No doubt a fair number of potential terrorists would take advantage of her plan since they tend to follow our immigration plans and be adaptive.

[The Schumer-Graham bill] will step up interior enforcement -- code for raiding employers and cracking down on their workforce to round up undocumented workers, a shameful Bush era policy that this administration has continued.

Workforce enforcement has been going on for decades; it wasn't invented by George W Bush. And, one wonders what form of immigration enforcement Shikkia Dalmmia would support. Would she even allow us to have border enforcement? She basically wants everyone in the world to be able to come to the U.S., against the wishes of the vast majority of Americans.

If I haven't shown to the reader that Shika Dalmia can't be trusted on immigration matters, please leave a detailed comment explaining why you think that and I'll go into more depth.

UPDATE: Not surprisingly, Glenn Reynolds links her article, adding nothing (pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/97228). That would seem to indicate that he agrees, and that's also not surprising.

[1] forbes.com/2010/04/06/
obama-immigration-reform-politics-opinions-columnists-shikha-dalmia.html
[2] Oddly enough Bob Barr also today comes out against that plan due to the ID card; is there a Journ-o-List for libertarian hacks?
blogs.ajc.com/bob-barr-blog/2010/04/07/
sens-graham-schumer-push-wolf-in-sheeps-clothing-national-id-plan