By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, April 20, 2021
It’s not 2007 again. But apparently no one has told
George W. Bush.
To coincide with the release of a book of his paintings
of immigrants, Out of Many, One, the former Republican president
wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post plugging the sort of
immigration package that went down to defeat in both his administration and in
the administration of his successor, Barack Obama.
Bush is an unusually sincere, earnest politician whose
views on immigration are deeply felt and honestly come by — they are just
anachronistic, or should be.
If there’s any lesson that everyone should have learned
from Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party, it’s that the party’s old
consensus on immigration is no longer sustainable.
Yet there’s still a reflex toward the lazy conventional
wisdom that all that ails the country on immigration is lack of an agreement to
give an amnesty to illegal immigrants already here and increase numbers of
legal immigrants, in exchange for more bells and whistles at the border — what
is commonly known as “comprehensive immigration reform.”
Bush says not passing immigration reform is his biggest
regret, and John Boehner, out with a score-settling memoir of his time as
speaker of the house, says it is his second biggest regret (after not forging a
big fiscal deal with President Obama).
Boehner spends a lot of time meditating on how the GOP
became, in his telling, “Crazytown,” a party of extremists and paranoiacs that
eventually threw itself into the arms of Donald Trump.
The former speaker spreads the blame widely, but it
evidently doesn’t occur to him that one major factor driving a wedge between
the party’s establishment and its grassroots was the elected leadership’s
insistence on repeatedly trying to pass immigration bills that Republican
voters rejected.
For his part, Bush sounds as if he’s learned nothing. In
his Post piece, he cites all the usual measures at the border
included in these sorts of bills — “manpower, physical barriers, advanced
technology, streamlined and efficient ports of entry.”
That’s all fine, but it is no substitute for rigorous
enforcement in the interior of the country and can’t counteract the
open-borders message sent by welcoming illegal immigrants into the country.
In that regard, Bush professes, as all supporters of
comprehensive immigration reform always do, to oppose amnesty as “fundamentally
unfair to those who came legally or are still waiting their turn to become
citizens.”
He then calls for an amnesty couched as, in one of the
laziest clichés in the immigration debate, bringing illegal immigrants “out of
the shadows.”
This will be achieved “through a gradual process in which
legal residency and citizenship must be earned,” by requiring “proof of work
history, payment of a fine and back taxes, English proficiency and knowledge of
U.S. history and civics, and a clean background check.”
Such requirements are always promised in comprehensive
immigration bills and are always toothless, serving only as a way to deny that
the amnesty for illegal immigrants is indeed an amnesty.
Bush says, as well, that both parties should be willing
to get behind “increased legal immigration,” a characteristic feature of these
bills. In another tired talking point, Bush insists that a higher level of
immigration is necessary to bringing more skilled immigrants — never
considering that we could also reduce the number of low-skilled immigrants.
But supporters of the old consensus aren’t especially
keen on understanding the arguments of opponents. Boehner refers to the
“far-right crazies” who never forgave John McCain for pushing immigration
reform and blames “demagogues” and sheer “stubbornness” for blocking a
comprehensive bill in 2014.
So far this year, Republican senators have only talked of
a narrower immigration bill focused on an amnesty for so-called Dreamers.
Surely, though, the instinct toward comprehensive immigration hasn’t gone away.
It’s up to Republican voters to constantly remind the party’s officeholders
that 2007 is, indeed, a very long time ago.
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