Heather Mac Donald, a journalist and fellow at the Manhattan Institute, can count immigration policy among her many areas of expertise. A contributing editor to the think tank's quarterly magazine City Journal and frequent contributor to important places like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, she also focuses on things like homeland security, policing and "racial" profiling, homelessness, education policy and business improvement districts. As details of the immigration reform bill were being fought over in the Senate, I talked to Mac Donald by telephone on Thursday from her home in New York City:

Q: What's good about the Senate immigration bill?
A: I think the idea of moving our immigration system to reward people who bring skills that this country needs and who will improve its economy and its level of education is a very positive step. I have read that the mechanisms of moving in that direction are rather arcane and not at all reliable -- and that it will take perhaps eight years before in fact the system is changed at all from its current family-based rationale -- but I think that is a very useful idea. I think trying to move toward a greater ability to check worker eligibility is also a good idea.

Q: Is there a worst part of this bill that you would point to?
A: The worst part is the overnight amnesty for the 12 million illegals who are here. They merely need to apply and show that they've been in the country before Jan. 1 and provide some effort at proving they are currently working and the government has 24 hours to decide whether they are not eligible by virtue of a criminal background check. I think that is one of the most automatic amnesties that has been proposed in the whole series of so-called reform bills. I think to send the message to the world that, as usual, we are not serious about our immigration laws, and that they don't mean anything -- that if you can get into the country you can expect an amnesty -- will make the idea that we have meaningful borders completely a joke.

Q: What is a sound-bite synopsis of your position on immigration?
A: I think immigration should be to benefit America. It's not a favor that we owe the rest of the world and we should craft immigration policies in ways that will improve our national competitiveness. That means bringing in people who have skills that will help the economy.

I'm also concerned with Hispanic immigrants. In the second and third generation, a significant portion of the children of recent Hispanic immigrants -- who are virtually all illegal but their children are legal -- are getting sucked up into underclass culture. You have the highest dropout rate in the country among Hispanics, the highest teen-pregnancy rate in the country among Hispanics and an out-of-wedlock birth rate that is 50 percent. These are all markers of future social pathology, so I think we are creating family breakdown and all of the problems that surely follow in the train of that.

Q: If you had to craft a smart, sensible immigration bill, what would it look like?
A: I think the point system is a good one. Currently, priority is given to legal immigrants who are family members of people who are already here, so they can bring in their extended families (chain migration). This bill would shift the emphasis -- after it takes eight years to churn through all the waiting list of the family chain migration -- to give points to people who have higher levels of education than the usual immigrants or have skills that are in demand here. This is a system that other countries have used.

Q: What else should a good immigration policy have in it?
A: It should have both the means and the will to enforce the laws that are on the books. Currently, it is illegal to hire an illegal alien. But the chance of any given employer or any given illegal alien actually being penalized for that law-breaking is close to zero -- even though the Bush administration has recently increased its enforcement to a certain extent. So I think we need a mechanism for ensuring that employers really are following the law. That will reduce the "jobs magnet" that does bring a lot of illegal aliens here.

Q: What about the "welfare magnet"? Does it bring as many people here as we think it does?
A: You definitely see "border babies." You see women crossing the border to deliver children here, both to get the medical services for free and also to confer automatic American citizenship on their children. The reason why a lot of people want to bring their parents here is not just family ties but also the availability of Medicaid for the parents. But even if people are coming for jobs, when you have a very low-skilled population whose children -- if they are born here -- are automatically eligible for welfare, you have high, high welfare use among the low-skilled immigrant population. It's because their kids are getting everything -- they're getting traditional welfare, food stamps; the parents qualify for Medicaid, which has gone way up among immigrants over the last decade. So whether or not they are coming for the welfare, they are certainly receiving it at very large rates. Continued...