Mark Steyn Twofer

Today is Mark Steyn twofer day. He's got another column up at the Chicago Sun-Times about the illegal immigration "reform" bill. And Steyn has some experience with the immigration system. He is, after all, an immigrant to this country. A legal one. Because of that particular history that he has, he notices something that is getting missed in all the rhetoric going on about this bill. The point he raises should make every, single American angry. Because there is something in the bill so fundamentally wrong, so much in violation of the American sense of fair play, that the bill should fail for that reason alone.

I wouldn't presume to speak for the millions of Americans who oppose this bill, but it's because I'm an immigrant myself that I object to the most patent absurdity peddled by the pro-amnesty crowd. The bill is fundamentally a fraud. 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.

Back in the real world far from those senators living in the non-shadows of their boundless self-admiration, the truth is that America's immigration bureaucracy cannot cope with its existing caseload, and thus will certainly be unable to cope with millions of additional teeming hordes tossed into its waiting room. Currently, the time in which an immigration adjudicator is expected to approve or reject an application is six minutes. That's not enough time to read the basic form, never mind any supporting documentation. It's certainly not enough time for any meaningful background check. Under political pressure to ''bring the 12 million undocumented Americans out of the shadows,'' the immigration bureaucracy will rubberstamp gazillions of applications for open-ended probationary legal status within 24 hours and with no more supporting documentation than a utility bill or an affidavit from a friend. There's never been a better time for Mullah Omar to apply for U.S. residency.

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 U.S. immigration in breach of its own procedures and re-emerged as the Washington sniper. The young Muslim men who availed themselves of the U.S. 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 11, 2002, six months to the day after famously flying his first and last commercial airliner.

The bill gives preferential treatment to those who broke the law to get here and literally penalizes those who have been trying to do it the right way. Is that really what the voters of this country want? (Hint to the Senators who cannot hear the voice of the people over the self-congratulatory voices in their heads: the polls say the people do not want this bill in this form at this time.) Americans should be righteously furious over this. My Mother's parents came to this country less than a century ago. They came through Ellis Island and their names happen to be inscribed there. They came here legally and became American citizens as soon as they possibly could. Both of their children were never taught Norwegian and were only allowed to speak in English at home - the better to help my grandparents master the language as much as for the kid's benefits.

But this sham of a "reform" would have sent them home had it been enacted back when they were playing by the rules. I'm quite sure that both of my grandparents would have been utterly and completely furious with this bill. Because they were Americans and they became citizens by following the rules and complying with the laws.