Shortly before Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president, I wrote a column suggesting we call off the inauguration — because the president-elect’s brother, Neil, had just disclosed that their Irish grandfather, Michael, had snuck into America.
“He was probably one of the early wetbacks, except that he came in from Canada instead of Mexico,” Neil told The Los Angeles Times.
What kind of signal, I asked, would we be sending if we swore in Reagan as president?
We’d be saying that no matter how you got into America, if you could find a wife and raise a family, you could become the grandfather to a president.
It was a humor column, supporting the radical, pro-immigration sentiments enshrined in the Statue of Liberty.
Reagan was sworn in, of course. His polices ignited an economic boom. And that boom attracted huge — in some cases, record — numbers of legal and illegal immigrants.
The way the Gipper carried all that off is one of the glories of his presidency, though it was not without its controversies. The big one was a bill known as Simpson-Mazzoli.
Reagan signed it, despite opposition from some of his most important allies, such as The Wall Street Journal. Free-market conservatives opposed the bill’s employer sanctions: Simpson-Mazzoli marked the first time any law held Americans criminally accountable for hiring illegal aliens.
It was a bet on an underlying deal, amnesty for 3 million illegals in return for enforcement of the immigration laws, including at the border. It turns out that Reagan was swindled, as Charles Krauthammer has put it.
We got the amnesty but not the enforcement. Yet it all seems quaint compared to the crisis that laws-without-enforcement has brought upon us today.
It is amazing how all this has soured during the Obama years. He isn’t the only one at fault for the current crisis. But it’s his watch, and he has a lot to answer for, starting with the Great Recession.
Oh, there was a window when he could blame the crash of 2008 on Bush. (A good deal of blame could also attach to the Federal Reserve.) That window for blaming Bush, though, has long since closed.
Obama has no one to blame but himself for the fact that the Great Recession and its aftermath have consumed the first three-quarters of his presidency.
Nor has he led on immigration reform — most notably failing to even try to pass a bill in the two years that his party controlled huge majorities in Congress.
Now he’s trying to pin the blame on the Republicans. This is his primary strategy, laid out in his Rose Garden remarks this week. House Republicans, he said, are “unwilling to stand up to the Tea Party in order to do what’s best for the country.”
“And the worst part about it is a bunch of them know better,” the president said.
What they know, though, is that the last time around, they passed an amnesty but failed to get control of the borders in return.
This is where the Tea Party earns its keep. Fool me once, it says, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on us.
Or, as it was summed up at the libertarian website Reason.com: “That the president would like Congress to do something doesn’t obligate Congress to act. Congress’ failure to act, in turn, doesn’t create any new right or opportunity for the president to act.”
And the Democratic threats get hollower by the hour. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said the other day that if Speaker John Boehner doesn’t act, Obama would “borrow the power that is needed” to solve the immigration problem.
What in the world is he talking about? The only thing the president can do — and he must do it — is enforce existing laws. And preserve, protect and defend the Constitution, which grants the naturalization power to only the Congress.
That power is to establish a “uniform rule of naturalization.” The Founders gave that power to correct a defect in the Articles of Confederation, under which each state could set its own rules for granting citizenship.
It must be galling to Obama that the grant of power is to the Congress. But there it is. The fact is that under our Constitution, all the president can do on immigration is what the Congress tells him to do.
So let the president get on top of the situation at the border, and then go to the Congress for reform. Let us inspire more immigration. But let’s do it the way Reagan did — with presidential strength and economic growth.