The latest amnesty: McCain and Kennedy make a bad pair on immigration.(PUBLIC POLICY)

SENS. JOHN MCCAIN and Ted Kennedy recently unveiled legislation that would give legal status--amnesty--to 10 million illegal aliens, and create a guest-worker program to admit even more foreign workers. They have an impressive collection of congressional supporters and interest groups behind them. But a bipartisan endorsement list can't hide the fact that this bill is a hoax we've seen before.

In essence it is the same as the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act: amnesty up front for millions of illegal aliens, and promises to enforce immigration law. Such promises are quickly abandoned--but in 1986, people didn't know that yet.

There was a sense then that the reform was a grand bargain--closing the back door by prohibiting the employment of illegal immigrants for the first time ever, but tying up the loose ends of prior policy missteps with an amnesty. But that bargain was never consummated. Over a period of several years, nearly 3 million illegal aliens (from a total of 5 million at the time) received amnesty, but the centerpiece of the enforcement side of the deal--the prohibition on employing illegals--could not possibly succeed, since the immigration service was not required to develop a system enabling legitimate businesses to determine who was actually authorized to work. Even this deeply flawed system managed to keep some illegals from getting hired, but that outcome only incensed the anti-borders crowd, which successfully lobbied for the system's abandonment a few years later.

The result of the amnesty was completely predictable: a profusion of fraudulent documentation, a doubling of the illegal population (to more than 10 million), and the normalization of illegal immigration, something that had been widely considered unacceptable only a few years before.

This is what McCain and Kennedy have repackaged and are trying to sell. The amnesty part of their proposal works this way: Illegal aliens are dubbed legal workers, and after a six-year period of indenture--plus some fines, background checks, and an English and civics test--they (and their families) get green cards. This is similar to how the last amnesty worked, except for the six-year wait; the 1986 law amnestied those who had already entered the country before a certain date, some four years prior to the law's passage. Thus the McCain-Kennedy proposal is a prospective amnesty, while the 1986 measure was a retrospective amnesty.

The bill's guest-worker provision allows 400,000 new foreign workers a year, with an escalator clause if businesses snap up the cheap, docile workers faster than expected. These "temporary" workers would have to serve only a four-year period of indenture before they, too, could get green cards. To accommodate them, legal-immigration quotas would be increased by that 400,000 per year.

The enforcement sections of the bill are laughably thin. The section on border security is almost a parody of a Washington cop-out: It orders up yet another "National Strategy for Border Security" (rather than picking one of the previous strategies and implementing it), plus an advisory committee, two coordination plans, and various other reports and programs and multilateral partnerships.