Mark Steyn ruminates on the term "Undocumented Workers."

I forget where I was when I first heard the phrase "undocumented worker." Possibly it was after swimming the Rio Grande and emerging dripping on the northern shore to be handed a fake Social Security number and a driver's license. But I assumed, reasonably enough, that this linguistic sleight of hand was simply too ridiculous to fly even with the American media. I underestimated my colleagues, alas.

The "undocumented" are, as it happens, brimming with sufficient documents to open bank accounts or, on the other hand, rent a Ryder truck, as Mohammad Salameh did in 1993 when he and his pals bombed the World Trade Center first time round. Being "undocumented" means being documented up to the hilt as far as everyone else is concerned but "undocumented" only to the US government. Which, when you think about it, is a very advantageous status to have.
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Its "comprehensive solution" to illegal immigration is simply to flip all the illegals overnight into the legal category. Voila! Problem solved! There can be no more illegal immigrants because the Senate has simply abolished the category. Ingenious! For their next bipartisan trick, Congress will reduce the murder rate by recategorizing murderers as jaywalkers.
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America has an illegal immigration problem in part because it has a legal immigration problem. Anyone who enters the system exposes himself to an arbitrary, capricious, whimsical bureaucracy: For example, one of the little-known features of this bill is that in order to "bring the 12 million undocumented Americans out of the shadows", millions of legal applicants are being hurled back into outer darkness. Law-abiding foreign nationals who filed their paperwork in the last two years would be required to go back to their home countries and start all over again. Not only does this bill reward law-breaking, it punishes law-abiding.

The people who are truly "anti-immigrant" are the folks who want to send that immigrant from Slovenia or Fiji who applied in May 2005 back to the end of the line. But then "comprehensive immigration reform" is about everything but immigration, including subverting sovereignty and national security. Remember the 1986 amnesty? Mahmoud abu Halima applied for it and went on to bomb the World Trade Center seven years later. His colleague, the aforementioned Mohammad Salameh, was rejected but carried on living here anyway. John Lee Malvo was detained and released by US immigration in breach of its own procedures and reemerged as the Washington sniper. The young Muslim men who availed themselves of the US government's "visa express" system for Saudi Arabia filled in joke applications – "Address in the United States: HOTEL, AMERICA" – that octogenarian snowbirds from Toronto who've been wintering at their Florida condos since 1953 wouldn't try to get away with. The late Mohammed Atta received his flight-school student visa on March 11th 2002, six months to the day after famously flying his first and last commercial airliner.

All the above passed through the US legal immigration system. And, whether they were detained, rejected, approved or posthumously approved, in the end it made no difference. Because US immigration had no real idea who these men were.

But, don't worry, they'll be able to handle another "12 million undocumented Americans" tossed in for express processing.

The real "immigration fraud" is not Mahmoud abu Halima's or John Lee Malvo's or Mohammed Atta's, but that of the politicians who attempted to foist this sham bill on the nation.