This is a little late, but I did a posting at The Hill's Congress Blog on McCain's La Raza speech. In the Q&A from that speech there was at least one important answer from McCain. When pressed whether he supported a single comprehensive bill that included both enforcement and legalization, he emphatically said "yes sir, of course ... one single, comprehensive bill." In other words, we're back to the same old phony "trigger" idea, where amnesty is promised to the illegals after some benchmarks are met. This may sound plausible, but it's a dodge — what we'd be likely to see is all illegals getting a provisional amnesty right away (like last year's infamous Z Visa) and the only thing "triggered" would be the former illegals' move up to the next status. This is why we don't need a bill that promises "enforcement first," but one that is "enforcement only," with any discussion of legalization put off to the future. That means lots of the illegals will have left by the time we get around to an amnesty, if that's what happens, and it's precisely that fact — i.e., that some of today's illegals will not get legalized — that is unacceptable to the amnesty crowd, including Sen. McCain. For him, amnesty is the goal, and the rest is just the spoonful of enforcement to help the amnesty go down.
And McCain's lack of seriousness about enforcement was clear from another part of that same answer: "we do need to have our borders secured, which we can do in fairly rapid fashion." Yeah, "rapid," so the amnesty can start as soon as possible.
