Public Backs Immigration Reform

"After a week at home with their constituents, the Senate architects of a delicate immigration compromise are increasingly convinced that they will hold together this week to pass an overhaul of the nation's immigration laws, with momentum building behind one unifying theme: Today's immigration system is too broken to go unaddressed," reports The Washington Post. "Congress's week-long Memorial Day recess was expected to leave the bill in tatters. But with a week of action set to begin today, the legislation's champions say they believe that the voices of opposition, especially from conservatives, represent a small segment of public opinion."

In "Illegal Immigration: Will Congress Finally Solve It?" Daniel Griswold, director of the Cato Institute's Center for Trade Policy Studies, writes: "Few people on either side of the immigration debate are happy with the status quo. Today an estimated 12 million foreign-born people live in the United States without authorization, with the number growing by half a million each year. Those immigrants fill an important and growing gap in the U.S. labor market. The U.S. economy continues to create hundreds of thousands of jobs each year for lower-skilled workers in such sectors as cleaning, food preparation, landscaping and retail."

Earmark Reform Ignored

"After promising unprecedented openness regarding Congress' pork barrel practices, House Democrats are moving in the opposite direction as they draw up spending bills for the upcoming budget year," reports the Associated Press. "Democrats are sidestepping rules approved their first day in power in January to clearly identify 'earmarks' - lawmakers' requests for specific projects and contracts for their states - in documents that accompany spending bills."

In "A Reality Check on Earmark Reform," Stephen Slivinski, Cato's director of budget studies, writes: "Nobody can really object to [earmark] reform. It's certainly a good idea to shed some light on what now-convicted über-lobbyist Jack Abramoff called the 'favor factory.' But we should be realistic about what these reforms can achieve. The impact is likely to be minimal. For starters, some supporters of the change hope the number of egregious earmarks will fall because members of Congress will be too ashamed to attach their names to them. But as anyone who's driven over Senator Robert Byrd Bridge can imagine, the problem isn't that members of Congress don't want their names affiliated with most earmarked projects. It's that so many of them do."

Investigative Aptitude Equals Effective Counterterrorism

"An informant who helped break up an alleged plot to bomb a fuel pipeline feeding the city's busiest airport was so convincing to the suspects that they actually thanked God he was with them, federal authorities said," reports the Associated Press. "The informant made several overseas trips to discuss the plot against John F. Kennedy International Airport, even visiting a radical Muslim group's compound in Trinidad, officials said. He also joined the plotters on airport surveillance trips -- where authorities were waiting, they said.... The four-person plot, revealed Saturday, demonstrated the growing importance of informants in the government's efforts to combat terrorism, particularly as smaller radical groups become more aggressive."

In "Data Mining Can't Improve Our Security," Jim Harper, Cato's director of information policy studies, argues that effective counterterrorism efforts do not require methods that compromise civil liberties, as in the case of data mining: "The 9/11 Commission report showed how investigators following leads and using traditional investigative techniques could have foiled al-Qaida's plans, although hindsight is 20/20. Had anyone in the national security bureaucracy known the devastating consequences the attacks would have, they would have had the focus to prevent them. That this did not happen is not an indictment of traditional investigative techniques, nor does it call for using data mining on problems it can't solve."

Today's Daily Podcast

"Scholars Charged with Espionage ," featuring Justin Logan

Today's Daily Commentary

"BGE Ratepayers, Behold the Man," by Thomas A. Firey

Samuel R. John, editor

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