At least Bush has dropped his infernal references to slacker Americans when talking about illegal immigrants. In his speech Monday night, instead of 47 mentions of "jobs Americans won't do," Bush referred only once to "jobs Americans are not doing" -- which I take it means other than border enforcement and intelligence-gathering at the CIA. For the record, I'll volunteer right now to clean other people's apartments if I don't have to pay taxes on what I earn.

Also, someone must have finally told Bush that the point about America being a "nation of immigrants" is moronic. All nations are "nations of immigrants" -- as Peter Brimelow pointed out brilliantly in his 1992 article in National Review on immigration, which left nothing for anyone else to say.

Of the "nation of immigrants" locution, Brimelow says:

"No discussion of U.S. immigration policy gets far without someone making this helpful remark. As an immigrant myself, I always pause respectfully. You never know. Maybe this is what they're taught to chant in schools nowadays, a sort of multicultural Pledge of Allegiance. ... Do they really think other nations sprouted up out of the ground?"

Brimelow then ran through the Roman, Saxon, Viking, Norman-French, Welsh and Celtic immigrant influences in Britain alone.

Instead of a moratorium on new immigration, I'd settle for a moratorium on the use of the expression "We're a nation of immigrants." Throw in a ban on "Diversity is our strength" and you've got my vote for life.

Bush has also apparently learned that the word "amnesty" does not poll well. On Monday night, he angrily denounced the idea of amnesty just before proposing his own amnesty program. The difference between Bush's amnesty program and "amnesty" is: He'd give amnesty only to people who have been breaking our laws for many years -- not just a few months. (It's the same program that allows Ted Kennedy to stay in the Senate.)

Bush calls this the "rational middle ground" because it recognizes the difference between "an illegal immigrant who crossed the border recently and someone who has worked here for many years." Yes, the difference is: One of them has been breaking the law longer. If our criminal justice system used that logic, a single murder would get you the death penalty, while serial killers would get probation.

Bush claimed the only other alternative -- I assume this is the "irrational extreme" -- is "a program of mass deportation." Really? Is the only alternative to legalizing tax cheats "a program of mass arrest of tax cheats"?

This is the logic of the pro-abortion zealots (aka "the Democratic Party"): Either lift every single restriction on abortion or ... every woman in America will be impregnated by her father and die in a back-alley abortion!

Those are your only two answers? Do you need another minute?

How about the proposal made on Brimelow's Web site, Vdare.com, that illegal immigrants be told they have two months to leave the country voluntarily and not have their breaking of our immigration laws held against them when they apply for citizenship from their home countries -- or not leave and be banned from U.S. citizenship forever? Continued...