It’s also a miscarriage of the rule of law. As my colleague Brianna Lyman noted yesterday, “no one deserves to be rewarded for violating our sovereign borders simply because they want to ‘pay taxes’ and ‘work.’” Billions of people all over the world would very much like to come here and pay taxes and work, our laws be damned. But our economy is not a possession of the world, it belongs to the American people. Foreign access to it, to the extent we allow it at all, should first and foremost serve the interests of the American people, not a contingent of foreigners who managed to get into our country and remain here for at least seven years without getting caught.
Lyman also correctly pointed out that we tried this one-time amnesty gambit before, in President Ronald Reagan’s 1986 immigration reform that gave amnesty to nearly three million illegals in exchange for vague promises about border security, which of course never materialized. When promoting his immigration reform, Reagan trotted out the line that we’re a “nation of immigrants,” which is exactly what Republican Rep. Mike Lawler said in support of the DIGNITY Act this week.
This is wrong. We’re not a nation of immigrants, we’re a nation of settlers. It’s also a miscarriage of the rule of law. As my colleague Brianna Lyman noted yesterday, “no one deserves to be rewarded for violating our sovereign borders simply because they want to ‘pay taxes’ and ‘work.’” Billions of people all over the world would very much like to come here and pay taxes and work, our laws be damned. But our economy is not a possession of the world, it belongs to the American people. Foreign access to it, to the extent we allow it at all, should first and foremost serve the interests of the American people, not a contingent of foreigners who managed to get into our country and remain here for at least seven years without getting caught.
Lyman also correctly pointed out that we tried this one-time amnesty gambit before, in President Ronald Reagan’s 1986 immigration reform that gave amnesty to nearly three million illegals in exchange for vague promises about border security, which of course never materialized. When promoting his immigration reform, Reagan trotted out the line that we’re a “nation of immigrants,” which is exactly what Republican Rep. Mike Lawler said in support of the DIGNITY Act this week.
This is wrong. We’re not a nation of immigrants, we’re a nation of settlers.