Earlier this century, conventional political wisdom posited that Republicans would never be able to win a national election unless the party out-pandered the Democrats on the issue of amnesty for illegal aliens. Republican political “experts,” who spent too much time listening to other “experts” instead of actual voters, insisted that supporting massive amnesties for illegal aliens was the key to unlocking the Hispanic vote for the party.
Enforcing laws has not exactly been the Democrats’ strong suit in recent years. At the federal level, the Biden administration has blatantly gutted border and immigration enforcement and is even defying court rulings ordering them to resume enforcement. At the state and local level, prosecutors have essentially nullified entire sections of criminal and civil codes by refusing to prosecute many offenders, while in some states “progressive” laws require that even violent criminals are routinely released without bail.
Last month, President Biden requested $13.6 billion in emergency funding to deal with record levels of illegal immigration. There is no disputing that the situation at the border constitutes a national emergency, but it is an emergency almost entirely created by the president’s own policies. As such, giving the Biden administration more money, without conditioning it on radically altering the policies that created the emergency, would only exacerbate the border crisis while plunging the nation $13.6 billion deeper into debt.
The idea of a merit-based immigration policy originated on the political left. It was first proposed by a blue ribbon panel, chaired by a civil rights movement icon, Barbara Jordan, in the 1990s. The commission’s recommendations for an immigration overhaul were immediately endorsed by President Bill Clinton and other leading Democrats and Republicans of the day and then, just as quickly, mothballed due to objections from ethnic interest advocacy groups and powerful cheap labor business interests.
The United States, under President Joe Biden, is sailing into uncharted waters. Democrats, for much of the past half century, have leaned in the direction of moving the United States toward the Scandinavian model of the “nanny state,” in which citizens surrender some of their freedoms and significant chunks of their paychecks in exchange for cradle-to-grave security.
The president’s allies in Congress seemingly drew a lesson from that debacle and appear determined not to get caught short when it comes to what seems like the Democrats’ single greatest political priority: gaining amnesty for millions of illegal aliens. After seeing Plans A and B dashed by Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough, congressional Democrats are poised to invoke Plan C.