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Cato Daily Dispatch for November 28, 2005

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Bush Builds Support for Immigration Plan
Alito on Abortion
Kyoto Protocol: Ineffective and Expensive

Bush Builds Support for Immigration Plan

"President Bush is trying to build support for a comprehensive immigration strategy even though Congress has shelved the issue for now," the Associated Press reports. "Bush's plan pairs a guest worker program for foreigners with border security enforcement, an attempt to satisfy both his business supporters, who believe foreign workers help the economy, and his conservative backers, who have made fighting illegal immigration a priority."

In his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Citizenship, Daniel Griswold, director of the Cato Institute's Center for Trade Policy Studies, said: "Our current immigration system is fundamentally out of step with the realities of American life and desperately needs comprehensive reform.

"Immigrants play an important part in the success of America's free-enterprise economy. Immigrant workers willingly fill important niches in the labor market. They gravitate to occupations where the supply of workers falls short of demand, typically among the higher-skilled and lower-skilled occupations. That hourglass shape of the immigration labor pool complements the native-born workforce, where most workers fall in the middle range in terms of skills and education. As a result, immigrants do not compete directly with the vast majority of American workers."

Alito on Abortion

"His mother may know best, but conservatives do not share her certainty that Samuel Alito would overturn abortion rights," the Associated Press reports. "Alito's independent streak is complicating what might otherwise be an easy call as people on both sides of the abortion divide try to figure out his likely course if he were confirmed by the Senate for the Supreme Court."

In "Alito and Abortion," Roger Pilon, the Cato Institute's vice president for legal affairs, writes: "There's little doubt any longer: Samuel Alito's now-famous 1985 memo has changed the dynamics of the upcoming confirmation battle. Not that abortion wouldn't be at the center of the battle in any event, but in that memo Judge Alito stated his view unambiguously: 'The Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion.' That denies him the option of remaining vague on the subject, say senators on both sides. Republicans Olympia Snowe and John Cornyn along with Democrat Charles Schumer are reported as saying Judge Alito now has only two options: He can say he's changed his mind; or he can say that Roe v. Wade and the cases affirming it since 1973 are now settled law, outweighing his view that Roe was wrongly decided."

Kyoto Protocol: Ineffective and Expensive

"A United Nations conference opening in Canada on Monday will try to step up a fight against global warming by drawing the United States and developing nations into United Nations-led agreements beyond 2012," Reuters reports. "About 10,000 delegates -- from 189 governments, environmental lobby groups and businesses -- will attend the Nov. 28-Dec. 9 talks meant to start mapping out what to do after the first period of the U.N.'s Kyoto Protocol ends in 2012."

In the Cato Handbook on Policy's chapter on global warming and climate change, Patrick Michaels, Cato senior fellow in environmental studies, writes: "[S]everal lines of evidence all point to the likelihood that warming in the next century is likely to be modest, and all evidence demonstrates that Kyoto will have no measurable effect on that warming. But the Kyoto Protocol is enormously expensive, reducing the amount of capital that can be invested in evolving and increasingly efficient technologies. It is an inescapable conclusion that the Kyoto Protocol, or other similar instruments (such as S. 139), is precisely the wrong thing to do about global climate change."

Kristen Kestner, editor, kkestner@cato.org