Well, it happened. The President announced his executive amnesty plan. As I explained to a reporter Thursday night, it seems like the deeper into his presidency that he gets, the more support the President loses among the American people. And the more support he loses, the more he tries to go it alone. His remaining supporters will tell you this is leadership. I disagree. The President had strong majorities in both the House and Senate at the beginning of his term. He’d promised he’d deliver amnesty. He didn’t. Even a Democrat-controlled Congress knew that the support for his plan wasn’t there. So they didn’t do it.
Our position this entire time has been that before any rational discussion could be had on this subject, the country needed to have positive control of its borders. If you just start out with amnesty, then people will flood the border trying to get in under the wire. That’s what we saw with the President’s first executive order on the children of illegal immigrants – a flood of unaccompanied minors at the border. At the same time the President was trying to tell Central American countries not to send their kids here, his agencies were under orders to accept all of the inbound kids. That’s not rocket science.
History is instructive here. In 1986, as most of you know, President Reagan reached an agreement on immigration. In exchange for the promise of future enhancements to border security, the estimated three million illegal immigrants in the country were granted amnesty. It was said at the time that once and for all, America’s broken immigration system would be fixed and we’d never have to deal with it again…
We all know how that turned out. A couple of short decades later, we had twelve million illegal immigrants living here. That is the effect that amnesty has… people expect another round of it in the future.
If you aren’t in a position to secure the physical border, you aren’t in a position to crack down on employers hiring undocumented workers, and you aren’t in a position to catch people purposefully overstaying their visas, then you aren’t in a position to grant amnesty and start the cycle all over again.
As everybody knows, we are a nation of immigrants. For generations, people have risked life and limb to get to this country in search of a better life for their children. We respect that narrative in America because it is our collective narrative. But if we are going to have a moral discussion about this issue in our country, then we need to talk about the millions of people all over this globe who are oppressed by their governments, starving for food and water, and desperate for a better life. They don’t all have access to a land bridge and an open border into America. They come here the right way – they visit consulates and embassies and they go through a remarkably arduous and lengthy process in order to get here. The President’s supporters will tell you that we have a moral obligation to accept the people who cut to the front of the line. They will tell you these undocumented immigrants have families and they desperately want to be Americans. Well so does every other applicant living in every other dark corner of this world. They also have children. They also fear for their lives. They also yearn for economic and religious freedom. And they can’t come here the right way because we’re already swamped with people coming here the wrong way.
Knowing this, the president and his supporters on this amnesty plan still feel like the top priority is rewarding the people who broke the law.
Maybe it’s a life spent in law enforcement, I don’t know, but I have never put the people who willingly break the law ahead of the people who faithfully follow it. I will never be convinced that amnesty without border security is a wise way to approach a broken immigration system. And I will never sit back and accept a President who tries to force his way because he is too lazy, too shortsighted, or too weak to engage with the other branches of our government. The ends will never justify the means when it comes to the very legal fabric of our great nation.
We are going to have a fight in Washington when Congress returns. I don’t know what that is going to look like yet.
U.S. Rep. Rich Nugent represents The Villages in Congress.