In his latest Wall Street Journal column Jason Riley holds forth on President Biden’s plans to reform our immigration laws:
So, Joe Biden wants to give immigration reform a go. Good luck, Mr. President, but recent history is not on your side and the timing is questionable at best.
I write that as someone who has been calling for decades for immigration reform that includes both better border security and conditional legalization for people who sneaked in. Our immigration system was designed to accommodate the economic needs of the 19th century, not the 21st, and major revisions are long overdue. The past three administrations tried and failed to get the job done.
George W. Bush had planned to make comprehensive border reform a first-term priority. As a former governor of a border state, he knew the issue inside and out. But the 9/11 attacks, the Iraq war, and low job-approval ratings in his second term conspired against him. Barack Obama chose to undertake legally suspect executive actions on immigration instead of negotiating a deal with Republicans in Congress. Donald Trump spent four years touting his “beautiful wall†and thrilling his base with anti-immigrant rhetoric.
Mr. Biden’s immigration proposal prioritizes an eight-year pathway to citizenship for the estimated 11 million undocumented aliens currently living here. “Unlike previous compromise bills,†the Journal reports, “Mr. Biden’s proposal lacks the countermeasures of increased security or deterrence at the border that Republicans have asked for in exchange for legalization.†In other words, Mr. Biden is calling for amnesty now and more border security at some unspecified future date. This is like a boxer leading with his chin.
He goes on to suggest a different strategy:
The president would do better to go small. There is bipartisan support for legalizing immigrants who were brought here unlawfully as children, for instance. And there is legitimate and widespread concern among Republicans that our asylum system is being gamed by people pretending to be refugees. Why not come up with a legislative compromise limited to addressing those two problems?
Let’s start with that proposal first. As far as I can tell although there is bipartisan support for “legalizing immigrants who were brought here unlawfully as children” what has blocked that from becoming legislation is the desire on the part of immigration activists both in and out of Congress to extend that protection to their parents. I have argued against that on the grounds that although the children have no res mea their parents do and that such an action would merely be a stalking horse for complete amnesty or, indeed, open borders. President Biden has already telegraphed that is likely the case.
The available evidence suggests that amnesty looms much larger for those who will benefit from it, e.g. activists and politicians, rather than for the illegal immigrants themselves. After the Reagan era immigration reform granting amnesty to everyone who had arrived in the U. S. prior to 1982, sometimes referred to as Simpson-Mazzoli, was enacted only a minority of those eligible ever sought citizenship, indeed, relatively few even sought legal status. Apparently, their distrust of government exceeded their interest in gaining citizenship. My conclusion from that is what we really need is not amnesty, a path to citizenship, or much of anything other than a guest worker program.
Additionally, Simpson-Mazzoli’s main failing was that the enforcement promised to secure its passage never materialized. Does anyone really think that this time will be different?
Finally, I would genuinely like to see a plan for ending the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States without controlling our borders. Inoculating the U. S. population would not be enough. The entire world would need to be inoculated. That is a problem several orders of magnitude greater than present plans can handle.
