Victor Davis Hanson says that President Bush’s immigration plan is insane, and a disaster waiting to happen: El Norte.

…what about the hundreds of thousands of workers who either cannot or will not participate? Will illegal immigrants outside the program be stopped at the border, requiring more guards or an extensive wall? Or once here, are they now to be deported without their requisite papers? Will we see a return of the old green immigration vans, the “Migra” patrols of my youth that used to scour central California to pick up illegal residents for immediate transit back to Mexico? Are we to establish two alternate universes: some employers who bring in workers legally, and others who follow the old non-system of paying largely cash wages to workers who show up at the local lumberyard parking lot or hotel lobby?

The proposed solution also assumes that illegal immigration is fuelled solely by too many jobs in the U.S. and too few workers. Yet thousands of other Mexicans come north as preteens, or when they are aged or sick. The impetus that brought them here was not necessarily always immediate employment, but understandable amelioration from a bleak landscape of central Mexico where they cannot be sure of finding food, housing or health care. Despite Hispanic activists’ complaints that “illegal alien” is somehow pejorative, it is far more accurate nomenclature than their inexact use of the politically correct “undocumented worker”—when thousands currently are not at work, nor did they merely forget to do the necessary paperwork before leaving home.