Anyone who has dealt with what we call "bureaucrats" knows that one of the most important things to a bureaucrat is having a form filled out correctly. Getting the forms right is the traditional sine qua non of bureaucracy.

In a previous post, I speculated that a major push for the immigration bill is coming from the bureaucratic classes, and not for the conventionally given reason that they're all a bunch of "Kumbaya" singers who love aliens and want to build a better Third World in America. Rather, it's because aliens make their job difficult:

IMO, a major push behind the immigration bill comes from bureaucrats and social workers who find the illegal status of the 12 million extremely inconvenient, but would consider their legalization through a complex process to be extremely convenient! Laws are often passed simply because bureaucrats hate to be inconvenienced or because they want more jobs. But both? What a win-win!

Rocio, a Mexican woman living in Norristown, is scheduled to have her second baby, a boy, by cesarean section next Sunday at Montgomery Hospital.

At that point, Medicaid, the federal and state insurance program for the poor, will pay for her hospital care and that of her baby, who will be an American citizen.

In the meantime, Rocio, whose full name is being withheld by The Inquirer, is among an increasing number of illegal immigrants getting prenatal care at clinics run by Norristown's two hospitals.

Federal Medicaid won't pay for that unless there's an emergency.

As to the fact that our government does not pay for prenatal care for these citizens of other countries, it's seen as a "quirk":

This quirk in the government's insurance program - a sign of the country's ambivalence toward its burgeoning population of illegal immigrants - leaves hospitals and doctors in a quandary: Subsidize prenatal care they believe is essential, or risk confronting much bigger problems when the women arrive in their emergency departments with labor pains.

Legally, the hospitals have to take care of women in labor. But they've been so strained by the cost of litigation, that already they can't afford it, and then the aliens come along, with the same rights to sue for malpractice that anyone else has:

By law, hospitals must care for women in labor.

The small but increasing number of pregnant, undocumented women in Philadelphia and in pockets of the suburbs is adding a financial stressor to the region's already strained maternity-care system, health leaders said. Since 1997, 14 area hospitals have stopped delivering babies. The big problems are inadequate payments from Medicaid and high malpractice-insurance costs, hospital leaders say, but poor funding for undocumented women, who often cannot afford care themselves, is rising in importance.

"There is a problem with underreporting of how many undocumented women there really are, and they're putting a huge strain on all of the safety-net systems," said Natalie Levkovich, executive director of the Health Federation of Philadelphia. "We're all in the same miserable, leaky boat."

Undocumented women constitute 60 to 65 percent of about 3,000 prenatal patients treated at city health clinics yearly, said Kate Maus, the Philadelphia Department of Public Health's director of maternal, child and family health. Eight years ago, she said, "all of them were insured."

Bear in mind that the Inquirer piece only dealt with a few hospitals in one municipality. Considering 12 million aliens in the US and the thousands of hospitals, I wouldn't be surprised if this one issue alone generates quite a few bureaucratic complaints.

Add to that the endless army of bureaucrats working in schools, social welfare departments, law enforcement agencies, child protective services, codes and inspections, various safety services -- all of whom need to fill out forms -- and the number of potential complaints and complainants is mind-boggling.

Does anyone think that bureaucrats will complain to taxpayers? God no! They might be the apparatchiks who run the government, but when they have a problem that needs solving, they complain to the people whose job it is to change the laws to make their job easier -- the legislature.

In this case the legislature was Congress, which was presented with a humongous piece of legislation hundreds of pages long which no human being could be expected to read, but which, if enacted, would make life a lot easier for bureaucrats who have to work with aliens -- mainly because every alien would have been given (or automatically qualified for) that magic number that is the bureaucratic Holy Grail of every important form:

The bill would have created a new class of visa, the "Z visa", that would be given to everyone who was living illegally in the United States on Jan. 1, 2007; this visa would give its holder the legal right to remain in the United States for the rest of their life, and access to a Social Security number.

Not to sound overly frivolous here, but from a purely libertarian perspective, has anyone considered that all these damned aliens running around in an unregulated and unnumbered state constitute a dire threat to the forces which want to keep track of and monitor every last human being? The fact is, illegal aliens have way more privacy than the average American, and if ordinary people figured it out, they might get jealous. Rather than deport round up aliens and deport them (or simply catch them by a process of gradual attrition), the idea is to force them into mandatory numbering. Lots more good jobs for the nanny state that way, with much more to come once the aliens learn that they qualify for benefits.

It's a little like California's AB 1634 -- California's mandatory spay and neuter act, which I called the "Ease Mental Suffering of Animal Control Bureaucrats Act," and which would effectively put most "companion animal" reproduction under state control.

This begs the question of who is running the government, of course. We kid ourselves by imagining that we the voters elect the people who actually run the government. We don't. The people who run the government are the same people who run our lives, and while the fiction might be that they answer to the legislators, more often the legislators answer to them. When the apparatchiks say "jump!", the lawmakers say "How high?"

Of course, sometimes (especially when the apparatchiks are feeling really big for their britches) they don't even need the legislature. They can simply rule by administrative fiat. In what I consider a shocking recent example of this, a few well-placed wretches at OSHA decided that they could use the "workplace safety" meme to attempt a back-door approach to gun control.

How? The NRA-ILA explains:

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has proposed new rules that would have a dramatic effect on the storage and transportation of ammunition and handloading components such as primers or black and smokeless powder. The proposed rule indiscriminately treats ammunition, powder and primers as "explosives." Among many other provisions, the proposed rule would:

* Prohibit possession of firearms in commercial "facilities containing explosives"--an obvious problem for your local gun store.

* Require evacuation of all "facilities containing explosives"--even your local Wal-Mart--during any electrical storm.

* Prohibit smoking within 50 feet of "facilities containing explosives."

Now, I realize that the people who hate guns would think this was a great idea, but can you imagine the outcry if Congress tried to pass laws mandating the same thing? It would be in every newspaper, the NRA would be up in arms, and there'd be a huge public debate. But OSHA does it -- and in language so dense and confusing and ridden with cross references that despite my legal training I was unable to make sense of it -- and there's barely a peep anywhere in the MSM. There's a lot more in the proposed regs, which are analyzed in some detail here. If you don't want to read it, take my word for it that it's some of most God-awful gobbledygook I've ever seen. (As unreadable as it is unconstitutional.)

Sometimes I wonder whether freedom will end that way. Not with a bang, or even a whimper. But with a long document that no one can read because it's designed to put everyone to sleep.