A proposal I consider modest...

...but Dubya's and Kennedy's real intentions can be guaged by how fast they'd reject it:

How about an amendment stating that whatever relief is granted to any illegal immigrant under this bill, must be granted to all persons here legally. So:

1. If illegal immigrants are to receive full amnesty for all back taxes they have failed to pay, then all Americans and legal immigrants currently owing back taxes are also instantly and fully amnestied -- all tax debts forgiven. If they only have to pay one year's taxes, then all persons here legally who owe more than a year's worth of back taxes have their tax debt instantly and irrevocably reduced down to one year's worth. Whatever break the illegals get, everybody gets.

2. Any legal immigrant instantly qualifies for any provisions of the Z visa, including such things as no obligation to learn English before your twelfth year here, the right to bring your family over to visit you even before there's any system in place to make sure they go back (thus getting them at the head of the line for the next amnesty even if you don't just get your next-door neighbor to sign an affidavit that they were here on 1 Jan 2007, thus getting them the instant Z-visa), the right to apply for all amnesty benefits immediately with no paperwork more onerous than that required for the Z visa, any legal immigrants facing deportation orders because of connections to terrorism are granted amnesty just like they would get if they were here illegally and their deportation hearings had already been held, etc. Oh, wait, we don't want people with terrorist connections to be granted amnesty? Too bad, you're not the President, and that's what the President wants -- since clearly the President (not being a hypocrite) has read the bill in its entirety and approves of all its provisions.

3. Any benefits such as Stafford Loans that are available to any alien, including former illegals amnestied under this travesty of a bill, must be made available to all U.S. citizens. It must be completely and utterly impossible for any alien amnestied under this bill to receive any taxpayer-funded benefit that any American citizen or legal immigrant is not eligible to receive -- and the illegal dude should stand in line behind the citizens and legal immigrants for those benefits.

4. Any crime that a rational person would consider a less serious infraction than entering the country illegally, committing repeated document fraud, and making use of public services to which one is not entitled while not paying taxes (and thus underbidding legal residents and citizens who have to demand wages high enough to cover the taxes they are paying), shall not under any circumstances be penalized more heavily than the $1,000 fine required to apply for a Z-visa. (The opinions of moronic intellectual contortionists who have talked themselves into believing that illegal immigration has not "really" been illegal for the last couple of decades, are to be completely discounted in this calculation.)

And if you can't get illegal aliens to come "out of the shadows" without offering them a better deal than you are willing to offer to people who are actually citizens or who have conscientiously followed our laws -- well, then, let 'em stay in the shadows for now.

I now pause to give Linda Chavez a chance to call me a racist, to give Dubya a chance to call me somebody who doesn't "want to do what's right for America," to let John McCain observe that I wish "intentionally to make our country's problems worse," and to allow the Anchoress to accuse me of stamping my feet childishly...