Bill want stop 75% of illegals

Washington Times:

The Senate's immigration bill will cut annual illegal immigration by just 25 percent, and the bill's new guest-worker program could lead to at least 500,000 more illegal aliens within a decade, Congress' accounting arm said yesterday.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said in its official cost estimate that many guest workers will overstay their time in the plan, with the number totaling a half-million in 2017 and reaching 1 million a decade later.
"We anticipate that many of those would remain in the United States illegally after their visas expire," CBO said of the guest-worker program.
In a blow to President Bush's timetable, the CBO said the security "triggers" that must be met before the guest-worker program can begin won't be met until 2010. Mr. Bush had hoped to have those triggers -- setting up a verification system, deploying 20,000 U.S. Border Patrol agents and constructing hundreds of miles of fencing and vehicle barriers -- completed about the time he leaves office in January 2009.
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Among the costs would be a new 4,500-employee government bureaucracy to administer the employee-verification system. CBO said it expects the system to handle 20 million verifications initially, with the number peaking at 160 million in 2010 before settling on an annual volume of between 70 million and 75 million verifications.
The report also figures that the new enforcement and verification will cut down on annual illegal immigration, but only by about 25 percent -- short of the expectation of some lawmakers defending the bill.
As for the security-enhancement triggers, CBO said an amendment passed last week to increase the number of agents to be hired and deployed means the goal won't be met until late 2010. The original goal was to hire 18,000 Border Patrol agents, but under the amendment that passed on a voice vote the Homeland Security secretary must now certify that 20,000 Border Patrol agents have actually been trained and deployed.
"CBO judges that the expanded requirements would add six months to the time necessary to meet them and that the secretary's certification would occur near the end of fiscal year 2010," the report said.

What is the value of the trigger if it is just a certification that employee targets have been met, when it clear that the illegal immigration flow has been degraded by only 25 percent? While it is hard to argue that more bodies are not needed it is also clear that those added will not be enough with out additional enforcement mechanisms. The most effective will be at the employer level. The story does not discuss the effectiveness of the employer verification requirement. The bill evidently does not address the problem of bogus social security numbers and the ability of enforcement people to access them and investigate the employee and employer.