Professor Stephen M. Bainbridge of UCLA has a Tech Central Station column about the Bush/Fox Amnesty. Due to time constraints, this will just be a brief Fisking:

If there are freeloading illegal immigrants sponging off the welfare state, as some of the more extreme voices on the right claim, this plan does nothing for such immigrants.

It does nothing against them, but anyway, "the devil is in the details."

Employers will benefit because they will be able to fill low-wage jobs without having to break the law or worry about the INS raiding them...

They don't worry now. Enforcement is way down from past years. Other than Wal*Mart, when's the last time you heard about an employer being raided?

Finally, creating a workable guest worker program is the humanitarian thing to do. The border crossing has become quite hazardous. Once they make it here, illegal immigrants are highly vulnerable to exploitation by unscrupulous employers.

Those illegal aliens who move in to replace the illegal aliens who've been bumped up a pay grade will face the same exploitation from the same employers.

In any event, what else would the critics have us do? There are somewhere between 8 and 12 million undocumented aliens in the U.S. At least three quarters of a million more arrive each year. Stepped up border enforcement hasn't stopped people from coming to this country.

How about, say, enforcing the current laws? If employers thought they might face large fines or even jail time, they would definitely think twice about hiring illegal aliens. The problem would eventually take care of itself. We can't complain that the system doesn't work when the problem is that we haven't been working the system.

Also, consider the quote from this post:

"[people like Gray Davis and President Bush] live in an echo chamber of elites, where the received wisdom on immigration is all the same..."

And, liberal blogger PG had an interesting suggestion:

the employers who hire illegals (and they are a minority; only 3% of all employers, by the GAO's count) calculate that they make more money by acting unethically. The monetary penalties for violating the law multiplied by the likelihood of getting caught equals a number much smaller than the profits of the behavior.

Those pansies at the AFL-CIO just want "enhanced penalties," but this form of white-collar crime should include criminal penalties. Those found responsible for knowingly or negligently engaging in violations of employment law (including hiring of illegal immigrants and any traffic in forged documents) should serve time in prison. The employer who has to factor possible prison time into her calculations of whether to permit undocumented workers to be hired is less likely to do so.

If prison is such a bloody good deterrent, we ought to use it more often to make people who are really freaked out at the thought of it behave properly. Jill from Human Resources is going to take the Big House more seriously than Leon from the Corner Crackhouse.

UPDATE: This article discusses the lack of enforcement: "In San Diego County, only one owner, whose company hired workers for major hotels, has been prosecuted since 2000, and he was given probation. No business has been fined." Once again, we can't say the system doesn't work if we're just ignoring the laws currently on the books.