Stop us if you’ve heard this one before. If Senate Republicans will agree to pass an amnesty package for the 15 million illegal aliens that Joe Biden has let into the country so far, the Democrats will support a border security package at some vague, nebulous point in the future. That should sound familiar to many Americans by now because it’s the same song-and-dance every single time.
The first time that the Democrat Party pulled this stunt was back in 1986 when Republicans fell for the Immigration Reform and Control Act. Ronald Reagan signed it into law and amnesty was granted to almost every illegal alien that had entered the country since 1982. All they had to do was attest that they were “farm workers.”
During their interviews with Immigration and Naturalization Service workers, the illegal aliens were all asked simple and basic questions about farming, to make sure they weren’t gaming the system. They gave it the old “college try,” with some answering that cotton is purple and that cherries are pulled from the ground.
Spoiler alert: Most of them weren’t farmers! But it didn’t matter, since they were all granted amnesty anyway.
As for the border controls in the Immigration Reform and Control Act, that never happened. Future sessions of Congress simply refused to pay for a wall on the southern border or more Border Patrol agents. The amnesty happened, but the border security didn’t.
Democrats tried to pull the exact same stunt in 2012, with the so-called “Gang of Eight” amnesty. Four Republicans and four Democrats in the Senate came up with a plan to grant amnesty now and secure the border sometime later. Fortunately, the outcry from the public ensured that the measure was narrowly defeated in the Senate.
Republicans shouldn’t fall for this same-old, same-old amnesty scheme this time either, which is being spearheaded by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) this time around. Unfortunately, some of them always do.
