Speaking contemporaneously of futile efforts being made to prevent World War II, Winston Churchill said, “When the situation was manageable it was neglected, and now that it is thoroughly out of hand we apply too late the remedies which then might have effected a cure.”
So it has been in modern America with immigration.
In 1986, concerned about humanitarian and practical challenges involved in deporting three million illegal aliens, Congress and President Ronald Reagan enacted a broad amnesty to be tied to a massive border strengthening to prevent millions more illegal aliens from entering our country.
Problem solved-except it didn’t work out that way.
That’s because Congress implemented its 1986 plan in reverse order: It provided amnesty without first securing the border. The amnesty acted as a lure, attracting more illegal aliens by suggesting that the path to legal U.S. residency and possible citizenship is simply to get here and stick around. Meanwhile, the border itself was not secured.
No wonder recent estimates put the number of illegal aliens here today at 11 million.
We can’t go back to 1986, but we can learn from it. No more carrots until the border is closed. Unfortunately, not everyone wants to learn this lesson.
President Obama apparently wants to grant amnesty, including a path to citizenship, without first making the border secure.
This president has refused to enforce all the immigration laws on the books now. Furthermore, his administration has been running advertisements in Mexico about food stamp availability here, and Obama’s allies in the Senate blocked a Republican move to end these ads during the sequester.
Obama’s Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, has even told Congress that the “border has never been more secure.”
But just a few years earlier in 2005, while George Bush was president and she was governor of Arizona, Napolitano declared that a “state of emergency” existed on the U.S.-Mexico border.
Her politics seem to have formed her opinions.
The administration supports-and the so called Gang of Eight’s immigration legislation includes-giving the executive branch the power to certify that the border is secure. Once that certification is in place, green cards can be distributed to those who came here illegally and the path to citizenship for illegal aliens can open.
Recall how quickly Janet Napolitano’s view of the border changed from “emergency” to “secure”?
Under the Gang of Eight’s legislation, the government official who gets to decide if our border is secure is-you guessed it-DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano.
If we don’t want a repeat of our 1986 mistake, we can’t allow passage of immigration legislation that lets the executive branch determine when the border has been secured.
Furthermore, if such legislation is to include an amnesty, such an amnesty should never be authorized before the border has genuinely been secured-for real. Or we’ll just be back where we started, with many more millions of illegal aliens.
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Amy Ridenour is chairman of the National Center for Public Policy Research, a conservative think-tank established in 1982.
Editorial, Pages 14 on 04/26/2013