Bush never learns

President Bush is still pushing to make it easier for foreigners to move to the United States:

After hearing graphic stories of suffering directly from persecuted young people who fled to the United States, President Bush intervened personally to sharply increase the number of refugees admitted to the country — undoing the severe limits placed on such admissions for security reasons after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The move to restore the world's largest refugee assistance program, and the president's role in it, has gone largely unnoticed amid recent squabbles in the Republican Party over related questions of post-Sept. 11 immigration and asylum policies.

But the details were visible in the thick budget proposal released by the White House last week. The State Department, the documents show, would aim to admit about 20,000 additional refugees next year — bringing the total admissions closer to the 70,000 level admitted in the years before the terrorist attacks.

And look who thinks it is a great idea:

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), the ranking Democrat on the subcommittee overseeing immigration matters and a frequent critic of the administration's approach to refugees, praised Bush's plan to increase the numbers.

In politics, a good rule of thumb is that if Ted Kennedy supports it then it is the wrong thing to do.