This time, amnesty will be different

As our great national conversation about “comprehensive immigration reform” gets under way, I wish both Democrat and Republican leaders, including Senator Marco Rubio, would spend a little time reviewing the comprehensive failure of previous amnesty plans, and explain precisely why this time will be different.

This seems like another one of those areas in which the past is never prologue, and each new government plan begins in a memory vacuum, as though the government had never tried to address the issue in question before.  You wouldn’t know it from today’s rhetoric, but we’ve had a few huge immigration deals before, and the primary result has been a bigger illegal immigrant problem.  In fact, we’re now being told that we must offer some sort of “path to citizenship” because it’s political suicide to oppose it.  Today’s headlines would have been dismissed as xenophobic paranoia, if offered as a prediction in the 1980s.  

Shouldn’t we review what both the boosters and critics of “comprehensive immigration reform” said in the past, and compare their rhetoric with the actual results?  Or do we have to pretend that we just noticed a problem that’s been building up for decades?  I realize that’s a rhetorical question, because we are required to believe that every problem created by government policies appeared out of thin air, right at the moment of crisis: out-of-control deficits, the subprime mortgage crisis…

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