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What Would Reagan Do? Here's What Reagan Did... [1]
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Date: 2023-05-04
Who said, “I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and lived here, even though some time back they may have entered illegally."
Before you read the answer, note that the person who said this didn’t limit it to the children brought here by illegals. He wasn’t proposing anything like DACA, even if it had existed at the time.
Ronald Reagan said this during a 1984 presidential debate.
And he meant it. Two years later Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act into law.
It was sold as a crackdown. There would be tighter security at the Mexican border, and employers would face strict penalties for hiring undocumented workers.
But the bill also made any immigrant who'd entered the country before 1982 eligible for - take a deep breath, xenophobes… amnesty.
I know that’s not a word not usually associated with the man some consider the father of modern conservatism. (I’d give that title to Barry Goldwater. But I’m not able to dictate such things.)
However, one of the lead authors of that bill said that unlike most immigration reform efforts of the past 20 years, amnesty wasn't the pitfall.
Former senator Alan Simpson said in an interview "We used the word “legalization.” And everybody fell asleep lightly for a while, and we were able to do legalization."
The law granted amnesty to nearly 3 million illegal immigrants yet was largely considered unsuccessful because the strict sanctions on employers were stripped out of the bill for passage.
Simpson says the amnesty provision saved the act from being a total loss. "It's not perfect, but 2.9 million people came forward. If you can bring one person out of an exploited relationship, that's good enough for me."
The late Rush Limbaugh and his reactionary ilk often invoked Reagan as a champion of the conservative agenda.
Sean Hannity once had a regular segment on his show called "What Would Reagan Do?"
Well, here’s what Reagan did.
Simpson said that Reagan "…knew that it was not right for people to be abused. Anybody who's here illegally is going to be abused in some way, either financially [or] physically. They have no rights."
Peter Robinson, a former Reagan speechwriter, agrees. "It was in Ronald Reagan's bones. It was part of his understanding of America that the country was fundamentally open to those who wanted to join us here."
Robinson revealed Reagan's own diaries show he found the idea of a militantly staffed border fence disquieting.
In a private meeting with then-President Jose Lopez Portillo of Mexico in 1979, Reagan wrote that he hoped to discuss how the United States and Mexico could make the border "something other than the location for a fence."
Reagan was not indifferent to the borders. On the contrary. Robinson noted "He would have been right there in saying, 'Fix the borders first.'”
Where he differed is his welcoming attitude toward immigrants. "He was a Californian. You couldn't live in California without encountering over and over and over again good, hard-working, decent people, clearly recent arrivals from Mexico."
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