Short reaction: I couldn't watch it, but I read it, and it's pretty much the common ground. It will please those in the middle who support immigration but want control of the borders. It won't please the ship-them-home bunch, and it's a bit wishy-washy on the how of controlling the borders, but it's a pretty good center to the issue.
My one quibble is that we cannot control the border by fences and patrols alone -- we need some special immigration arrangement with Mexico that gives them a larger legal quota than Sierra Leone or Norway. The current regime allows no legal immigration from Mexico unless they have relatives here already, which means you mostly get dependents, not workers. There needs to be some possibility of immigration -- some line to stand in -- for all the others, or we'll be back here in 20 years.
UPDATE: Watched the speech finally. Good God, but Bush can't give a set speech to save his life. I've seen him in impromptu settings, and he's pretty good, but he turns a fine written speech into something rather tedious. Reagan he isn't.
Posted by Kevin Murphy at May 15, 2006 06:32 PM