There's a very old joke about an author who receives a rejection notice from a publisher. "Parts of your manuscript are both good and original. Unfortunately, the parts that are good are not original, and the parts that are original are not good."

So it is with pResident Bush's latest attempt at public speaking. Thanks to DUer newsguyatl, I was treated to a Bushism-free version of his address.

Bush isn't the first world leader to come up with a scheme like this. A little East German guy named Erich Honecker--who was chief of construction troops in August 1961--devised it first. Bush's speech wasn't so much an outline of his plans to strengthen the border against illegal immigration as it was his announcement that he plans to rebuild the Berlin Wall.

We can't call it the Berlin Wall because it isn't. Let's call it the Bush Wall.

The proposals Bush laid out tonight are far-reaching:

* Construction of the Bush Wall.
* Issuance of biometric identification cards, probably to every person who is legally entitled to be in the United States and eventually including US citizens.
* Massive increases in Border Patrol staffing.
* National Guard infill of Border Patrol units while new Patrol agents are recruited and trained.
* Improvements in deportation procedures.

So far so bad. Except for the fact that we're trying to keep people out and not in, this looks very much like the work of East Germany's Border Command Central--the unit responsible for securing the Berlin Wall. And then it gets curious:

* Guest worker program.

This is really the strangest part of the whole program. It shows how utterly clueless the administration really is on this problem. Under this program, a Mexican who's willing to pay for a criminal background check can apply to be a guest worker. As a guest worker he'll be employed at a legal wage with a company that will pay the employer's share of his unemployment and worker's comp payments and withhold his federal and state income taxes and FICA payments. He's going to do this because, according to Mr. Bush, there are jobs Americans won't do.

That sounds great until you understand that the reason Americans won't do these jobs is that, for the most part, they're never offered them. An illegal will work for three or four dollars an hour--good money in parts of Mexico--and you don't have to pay unemployment or worker's comp on them. And if they get injured at work...hey, no problem, you can just fire them even if they weren't at fault.

Bush knows this. He has to.

Don't believe that Bush is serious about curbing the illegal immigration problem, because he isn't. Please note that in his entire speech he never once spoke of penalties for hiring illegal immigrants. He spoke at length of some really bizarre scheme for allowing illegals to become citizens, starting with an unspecified "meaningful penalty for breaking the law" followed by a requirement that they "pay their taxes." I feel that most illegals, given the choice of paying a large fine plus a hefty back-tax bill (and remember, the IRS charges interest) then waiting for a number of years to be sworn in as citizens, or continuing to take their chances, most will continue to take their chances.

The only nod he made toward the corporations who employ illegal aliens was a mention of this new biometric identification card. With it, no employer will ever have reason to not know the legality of the workers he employs. It sounds great, right? Actually it doesn't. We already have usable methods to determine the legality of workers. The problem isn't forged documentation. It's day labor, where a worker toils all day and receives an envelope of cash that night and the foreman does his best Willy Wonka imitation and tells his workers, "I don't want to know your names; I can't see where it would make a difference." It's lettuce growers telling their field boss to "get you a truckload'a wetbacks to work these three fields." It's the guy running the rubber baby buggy bumper factory who hires undocumented workers because they know that if they call OSHA about the ten-foot-wide puddle of toluene diisocyanate three feet from the boiler, the boss will call the Migra. Bush didn't discuss any of the reasons people hire illegals. He never will.

If he wants to address illegal immigration he's got to go after the source of the problem--tens of thousands of small businesses who don't want to file paperwork or pay $5.15 per hour to their employees. Drying up the souece of jobs will do far more to stem illegal immigration than asking illegals to pay ten to twelve years worth of back taxes.

The speech was a failure. Like everything else in his life.