Remember the children's song about the old lady who swallowed a fly? We don't know why she swallowed the fly, but the poor woman begins consuming more and more to address the fear that she'll die for swallowing the fly.

She does die, eventually, after swallowing a spider to catch the fly, a bird to catch the spider, a cat to catch the bird, a dog to catch the cat, etc., till she gets a horse.

Children laugh at the delightful absurdity. But the lesson of the old woman is instructive. Don't swallow something you shouldn't, and if you do, don't swallow something else you shouldn't and think it'll help. Especially if it's something even bigger.

Would that the Senate understood that lesson as they grapple with the issue of illegal immigration.

From reports, the Senate amnesty plan is attempting to address the problems of the coming Social Security crisis, the surge in illegal immigration since the last amnesty (or amnesties), and the labor crisis (i.e., the "Americans won't work those jobs" problem).

Just as the old lady wasn't content to digest the fly (let alone take an emetic) but rather chose to repeat her folly on an increasingly larger scale, the Senate is not about to deal with the underlying causes of those problems, but make them worse.

Lawmakers long ago swallowed the flies of the Social Security Ponzi scheme, the minimum wage, numerous welfare programs, and previous amnesties of illegal aliens. These applied disincentives to poor Americans to work, reduced the number of potential jobs employers could offer (legally), priced the least skilled American workers out of the job market, reduced the cost and stigma of not working, and grew generations of Americans increasingly reliant on the government to care for them, even as the inevitable Social Security shortfall draws nearer.

Furthermore, it dangled more and more incentives to people in poorer nations south of our borders to sneak in. They weighed the benefits of more employment opportunities and more government handouts against the reduced risk of being deported and greater likelihood of being able to stick it out till the next amnesty rolls around. One cannot blame the border-crossers for leaving extreme poverty to come here. Continued...