The good news is that Senator Rand Paul has come out against the Senate Gang of Eight immigration amnesty bill ( peekURL.com/zABjLGj ). The bad news is that he opposes the bill for almost all the wrong reasons.

Paul says that he'll "be voting no on the Senate's Gang of Eight immigration bill for one simple reason: because the legislation does not secure the border first." See that link, especially the part about "first". When someone ways to "secure the border first", you need to ask what's second. In Paul's case, that would be some form of massive legalization program. And, that would eventually lead to millions of current illegal aliens eventually becoming citizens. The Democratic Party isn't going to just let millions of potential voters remain as legal residents: they and their far-left allies such as the American Civil Liberties Union will work night and day to put legalized workers on the "path to citizenship".

Paul says the "American people desperately need immigration reform", when the opposite is the case: we need to reduce the number of illegal aliens in the U.S. in order to improve the situations of the millions of Americans negatively impacted in various ways. We need to oppose "reform" because it's a key way to keep the corrupt elites in check.

Then, Paul says:

Of paramount concern is what to do with the 12 million people currently residing in the United States who are in legal limbo. No one is seriously contemplating they leave, but conservatives believe that normalizing their status should only follow serious efforts to secure the U.S.-Mexican border.

Why is that of "paramount concern"? Why isn't, for instance, those Americans whose wages are negatively impacted by the presence of those illegal aliens the "paramount concern" of Rand Paul?

And, plenty of very serious people - people much more serious than Rand Paul - support attrition, which does envision many illegal aliens leaving over time.

Note also that Rand Paul uses "normalizing", an odd euphemism he's used before.

Rand Paul then says:

The Gang of Eight bill actually decreases the number of visas for agricultural workers. Haven’t we seen this movie before? If work visas are less than what the market demands, the workers will come illegally - and we’re right back where we started.

The "market" Rand Paul references isn't a free market at all. Corrupt growers in effect pay off corrupt politicians to look the other way and allow illegal immigration. Those growers get labor that's cheap to them and get to pass on the full cost of that labor to everyone else: they get to "privatize the profits and socialize the costs". It isn't so much that "the workers will come illegally", it's that corrupt politicians will allow them to come here illegally because they're paid off. Rather than fighting against that, Rand Paul would enable it.

The fact is that there's no real shortage of farm labor; see crops rotting in the fields. Growers just want as much cheap foreign labor as they can get rather than investing in new ways of crop production that would be less labor intensive. See immigration agriculture for much more.

Then, Rand Paul references an amendment of his that was voted down that he claims would have provided "protection against any Obama administration attempts to force American citizens to carry around a biometric national identification card". Such a card is to be avoided, but those who enable illegal immigration (such as Rand Paul) are the biggest helpers the John Poindexter types could have. By encouraging anarchy, they encourage a crackdown which will get much more popular support.

Then, Rand Paul finally gets one thing right:

Part of the current bill makes it easier for convicted criminals gain legal status - gang members, drunk drivers, and sex offenders, to give a few examples.

Good for him. However, it's then back to getting things wrong. As with ag workers, he wants us to greatly increase legal immigration in order to prevent illegal immigration, saying "inability of so many people coming to the United States to obtain work visas has always been a primary driver of illegal immigration". We simply can't change our laws to make things easier for foreign citizens, and if millions of foreign citizens want to come here illegally then we have to enforce our laws and prevent them from doing that. There's also the highly negative impact such a mass influx would have on Americans (not that libertarians care much about that). And, there's the fact that there's a virtually unlimited supply of people who'd want to come here. There are still 500 million people in Latin America, and there are over 5 billion people around the world who are poorer than Mexicans.

Near the end, Rand Paul says:

It is now up to the House to champion real immigration reform. If we’re going to fix our broken borders and overhaul the system, the House will have to lead the way; the Senate version has simply failed to address our immigration problem with any competence.

It should be obvious that new legislation won't "fix our broken borders": the borders are "broken" because of the political corruption discussed above. The solution to such corruption isn't to reward the corrupt as any form of immigration "reform" would do, it's to discredit corrupt politicians like Rand Paul.

Want to do something about this? On Twitter, look up those who support @SenRandPaul and send them this link or make the points above and on the Rand Paul page to them.