The brand new Acme Corp is looking to hire a staff and announces all employees will be paid $1000/day, with cash to be distributed at the end of each workday to employees leaving the building. Needless to say, there will be applications galore. Now, imagine that they will only accept applications on Tuesday afternoon at the front desk. Suddenly, instead of a streamlined process whereby applicants can send in their resumes to be checked and selected in a relatively efficient manner, you've got thousands of people lining up to submit applications. Trying to make that flood manageable, Acme will spend as much time trying to keep qualified applicants out as they will spend trying to keep criminals out. That's a security problem.

Imagine further that, since the vast majority of those thousands never had the opportunity to be interviewed, they decide to just show up at the job site and try walking through the door. That's another security problem. Security may stop some of those people, but they won't stop all of them. Those they stop can try again. And those who succeed and engage in some sort of work inside the job site now represent a further problem. Do you give them jobs? Do you spend all day checking the paperwork of employees?

The security problems were created by the poor procedures. Acme doesn't need to solve both problems at once. They can effectively solve the vast majority of the security problems by resolving the procedural problems. With a streamlined application process, you don't need to station 20 guards at the front desk.

The difference between 1986 and now, as Gen. Meese points out, is that we called this amnesty in 1986. Today, people get very unhappy when that label is applied to essentially the same approach. The only difference appears to be the requirement to pay back taxes, hardly a differentiator that would lead reasonable people to conclude that this is not a repeat of Simpson-Mazzoli.

John Hawkins: Aggressively enforcing the laws on the books would have helped the situation we're in tremendously, yet they're not being enforced. How do we know they'll be enforced this time?

Meese: "I think that's always a problem as we found following 1986. In the '90s, there was very little concern for upholding the law."

Can we pause for a moment and admire the greatness of that quote from Meese on the '90s before I move on to say that he added that better technology and increased border control forces will help enforce the laws in a way we couldn't post-1986 amnesty.

Meese and Heritage Foundation's Matthew Spaulding review 1986 amnesty...Meese advocates increased interior enforcemend, strengthened employer sanctions...possible private sector outsourcing for a bona fide temporary worker program after immigration enforcement takes place...more local-state-fed police cooperation...amnesty vs. mass deportation is a false choice...

Meese also said that he believe that if we do have a temporary worker program, it should start with pilot program and should be handled by private sector organizations like employment agencies.