The Washington Times reports the sad news:
The Senate yesterday voted against securing the border before implementing provisions that would grant the right of citizenship to millions of illegal aliens and that would double the flow of legal immigration.
The amendment would have delayed the "amnesty" and guest-worker provisions in the Senate's comprehensive immigration-reform bill until the border had been sewn up successfully. The majority of Democrats, 36 of 44, were joined by 18 Republicans and the chamber's lone independent to kill the amendment on an 55-40 vote.
Not that we didn't see it coming, but it's still disturbing. Luckily Sen. Jeff Sessions was able to make a small difference in the number of immigrants to be allowed into the country, thanks to number-crunching research done by his staff and the Heritage Foundation, which I reported about earlier this week. The Times reports that Session's work has paid off, to a degree:
Sen. Jeff Sessions, Alabama Republican, who has led the effort to reveal the numerical consequences of the Senate bill, hailed last night's action and said it would reduce the final number of guest workers and family members to fewer than 9 million over the next two decades.
"This amendment represented a massive victory over the open-borders lobby," he said after the overwhelming vote to approve the amendment. "It fundamentally changed the low-skill foreign-worker caps under the Senate bill by doing two things - reducing the annual low-skill foreign-worker cap from 325,000 to 200,000 per year and eliminating the automatic 20 percent increase to the cap that could have occurred annually."
