The muddled immigration policy debate

Hugh Hewitt:

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"We're not winning this fight," Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., opined. "They are mounting a better campaign than we are — the opposition is."

Neither the Speaker nor the Arizona senator, nor President Obama, nor many, if indeed any, of the hundreds of Beltway voices on the subject seem to listen much. If they did, if they truly listened, they'd know there was a pretty straightforward way out of the impasse on the issue.

That path forward was touched on in an op-ed by Arkansas Congressman Tom Cotton in the Wall Street Journal last week.

"Effective enforcement requires a border fence, a visa-tracking system to catch visa-overstayers, and a workable employer-verification system," Cotton wrote. "The Senate bill fails on all three fronts."

"When I was a soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan," Cotton added, "my units relied on guards and technology to secure our bases, but the first line of defense was always a physical perimeter."

Cotton's clarity and directness underscores why so many hope the former Army Ranger and Harvard Law grad will challenge the hapless Mark Pryor, the Arkansas Democrat who holds the seat because he holds his father's name. The elder Pryor was in the seat from 1979 to 1997, and was governor and congressman before that. Pryor the younger should topple easily to the young Congressman with the distinguished service record, but before Cotton beats Pryor, he is committed to beating back a terrible immigration bill.

House Republicans are deeply divided between the do-nothings, the do-somethings and the do-something-mores. There aren't any House GOPers leading cheers for the mangled Senate bill, an 800+ page monstrosity that came out looking like Obamacare with a bonus for defense contractors interested in selling high-tech toys to the Border patrol.
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Any House bill that does not mandate a minimum 700 miles of double-layered fencing, across tribal lands where necessary, fully funded and backed by the "notwithstanding any other law" language that trumps conflicting statutes like the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act and the National Environmental Policy Act, is a head fake, a breach of trust with border security conservatives, and a death knell for immigration reform in this Congress. Pushing fake solutions and fake fences guarantees real anger directed at GOPers voting for the fraud.  (Emphasis added.)
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Cotton is showing some clear thinking on the issue.  That seems to be a rare commodity when it comes to immigration reform.  The Senate bill is more of the same only worse.  It does nothing to fix the problem and only invites further illegal entry into the US so they can wait for the next amnesty.   We need both border protection and inland enforcement of the laws, but with this administration we are getting precious little of either.  Why should voters trust them to enforce the new law even with more border agents and what will they do with people who slip by the new border agents?