Want to know what's actually in the fantastically awful immigration "reform" bill that the U.S. Senate—the "world's greatest deliberative body"—is grinding through these days?

For most of us laypeople, actually reading the bill isn't the way to go.  One quickly gets lost in the labyrinth, especially where the bill references and slightly tweaks existing law. 

For example, here's something from page 1,235 of the bill's May 28th version * [5.3-MB PDF]:

(b) ALIENS UNLAWFULLY PRESENT.—Section 212(a)(9)(B)(v) (8 U.S.C. 1181(a)(9)(B)(v) is amended

   (1) by striking ‘‘spouse or son or daughter’’ and inserting ‘‘spouse, son, daughter, or parent’’;

   (2) by striking ‘‘extreme’’; and

   (3) by inserting ", child," after "lawfully resident spouse".

So what to do if you need solid information about the bill's contents for purposes of explaining its horrors to people face-to-face, going on talk radio, writing letters-to-the-editor, etc.?

VDARE.com's Patrick Cleburne has pointed enthusiastically to a number of posts this spring by the indefatigable Daniel Horowitz, articles that provide descriptive commentary on the bill's ubiquitous victimizations of the American citizenry.  These articles are definitely worth the attention of anyone who wants important details about the bill.

An indefatigable bunch is made up of experts at NumbersUSA, who have distilled a huge amount of information about the bill into a couple of brief PDF documents.  Everyone seriously concerned about the legislative coup d'etat represented by S.744 needs to at least look at these, so you know what's available.

There's so much content at NumbersUSA's website (as in VDARE.com's archives), that you often have to know fairly precisely what you're looking for.  First, here's their overall "Stop Amnesty" page [link], which is the gateway to voluminous information; please do take a tour there.

Then here are the two documents especially useful for our present purpose, also linked at that "global" page.  The two-page Gang of Eight Amnesty Bill — Bad For America [link; 159-kB PDF] is fairly discursive, giving a top-level look at the bill's effects.  I won't quote from it; give it a look.

Next, 4 BIG Problems With Senate’s S.744 Immigration Reform Bill [link; 102-kB PDF] uses smaller type than the preceding and thereby packs a lot more information into its two pages.  I'll provide one sample, which has the subtitle "UNLIMITED COMPETITION TO AMERICANS WITH HIGH EDUCATION":

S.744 creates four new unlimited employment-based green card preferences for: 1) Aliens with a PhD in any field (p. 315), 2) Foreign Physicians (p. 315), 3) Foreign Students that graduate from a U.S. university with an advanced degree in a STEM field (pp. 315 – 318), and 4) Spouses and Minor Children of all employment-based Entrants (p. 319).

[Both NumbersUSA documents were updated on May 16, and page numbers refer to "Schumer’s Substitute Amendment to S.744."]

Heard about any of those marvelous features in the "complicit media"?

I hope VDARE.com readers will put the wealth of information in those documents to good use. 

But something else needs to be said about huge bills such as S.744 (and Obamacare and Dodd-Frank ...): Bills like this are wrong in principle, irrespective of their content—they are an affront to self-government.

This fundamental point was memorably explicated by National Review's Andrew McCarthy (a former Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York and the lead prosecutor in the case of the "blind sheik"), writing—appropriately for our purposes!—in support of Arizona's immigration enforcement law, SB1070:

The consent of the governed, it is worth remembering, is the only just source of the power that government wields in a free society. One cannot consent to what one cannot know. Thus, there can be no legitimate government if, as Madison put it in Federalist No. 62, "the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes, that no man who knows what the law is today, can guess what it will be tomorrow."

Our elected officials and judicial officers don’t rule us. They are there to govern, to implement our will. When they resort to impenetrable legislative monstrosities to implement their own will without our consent — indeed, over our objection — that is not governing. It is dictating.

Maybe that’s the Obama administration’s problem with Arizona’s new law: It is too short (16 pages), too clear, and too reflective of the popular will.

[Illegal Aliens: Law and Sovereignty in Arizona, April 29, 2010]

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* Under the wizardry of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the version they reported out to the Senate floor on May 28 had mushroomed to 1,922 pages [!!!] from the 844 pages of the bill as it was introduced on April 16. [1.6-MB PDF].  But the later version has its first 845 (approximately) pages crossed out (literally!), with the committee's version pasted, in italics, starting at line 18 of page 845 and running to the end.  So the version that reached the floor actually has only 1,077 pages of operable—and scintillating!—legislative language.  (I don't know if the subsequent amendment process has significantly boosted the page count.)