In a 1980 Republican presidential primary debate held in Houston, an audience member asked candidates George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan whether “the children of illegal aliens should be allowed to attend Texas public schools for free, or do you think the parents should pay for their education?” Bush, who by that time had served in numerous legislative, diplomatic and intelligence roles, introduced his answer by presenting the values he believed should drive the conversation.
“I’d like to see something done about the illegal alien problem that would be so sensitive and so understanding about labor needs and human needs, that the problem wouldn’t come up,” he said. “But today…I would reluctantly say I think they [should] get whatever it is that society is giving to their neighbors.”
He then went on to lament what he saw as a failure of the U.S. immigration system, which was “creating a whole society of really honorable, decent, family-loving people that are in violation of the law.” He added that he also didn’t want to see undocumented children “totally uneducated and made to feel that they are living outside the law.”
Reagan, the former actor and Governor of California, didn’t negate Bush’s focus on the dignity of migrants. Instead, he chose to focus on a different angle, which, at the time, was the rising unrest caused by massive unemployment in Mexico. Migrating to the U.S., even without documentation, was “the only safety valve they have…that probably keeps the lid from blowing off down there,” he said.
Reagan, Bush, and the Last Significant Reform
The two candidates would go on to occupy the White House for the following 12 years. They would be responsible for the last significant legislative and executive actions regarding migration our country has seen.
In 1986, Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) into law. The IRCA extended legal status to almost three million undocumented immigrants who had been in the United States since before 1982. To qualify, applicants had to pay fines and back taxes, pass a background check and prove basic proficiency in English and civics.
The IRCA also provided funds for increased border security, which laid the groundwork for the future militarization of the border. This led to an increased death toll among migrants from the south, who took more dangerous desert routes to enter the country.
What the IRCA failed to do was address what to do with migrants who entered the U.S. without documentation after 1982. This failure, along with an increased focus on border security and deportations among all future presidents, laid the groundwork for the current immigration crisis we now find ourselves in.
History tells us the story of migration isn’t as simple as saying that Republicans are hardliners and Democrats are soft on immigrants.
Clinton-Obama
Bill Clinton, who ascended to office in 1993 as a “tough on crime, ‘New Democrat,’” signed legislation that expanded grounds for deportation to include even minor offenses. The law also established processes for “expedited removal” and mandatory detention, which President Trump has exploited. Clinton also created stricter border-enforcement mechanisms in urban areas, heightening the dangers posed to immigrants from the Reagan-Bush era policies.
Despite his later push to focus on the deportation of felons, in his first term, President Obama’s administration earned him the nickname “Deporter in Chief” by immigration rights advocates because of his record number of deportations.
Authoritarian Shift
As recent as the 2016 Republican primaries, the GOP has had factions that supported a more nuanced and comprehensive approach to immigration. In that race, candidates such as Chris Christie, Scott Walker, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush expressed a belief that undocumented immigrants should have some path to, at the very least, legal residency without being deported.
Between 1986 and 2016, political discourse around immigration reflected the tension between what to do about the border and what to do about undocumented immigrants. Although different political factions prioritized one issue over the other, there were still serious, good-faith efforts to address both issues simultaneously.
The last such effort was the 2013 immigration reform bill that passed the Senate with a bipartisan vote of 68-32. The legislation would have created a 13-year path to citizenship for all undocumented immigrants living in the U.S., with a shorter, easier path for those who were brought to the country as children. At the same time, it would have increased border security and modernized the systems for tracking the movement of migrants.
The bill never came up for a vote in the House, as Republican factions were already moving toward a more restrictive stance toward immigration. The sentiment, stoked by conservative radio and an emerging online ecosystem of immigration hardliners, was becoming, “We won’t do anything about undocumented immigrants until they are sent back and the border is closed.”
In other words, like similar beliefs about the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, “We will acknowledge your humanity as soon as you acknowledge our dominance.”
But Donald Trump took it even further.
Rather than starting from the premise that most immigrants are good people who deserve to be treated with dignity, and conceding there are some dangerous ones who need to be deported, he framed every conversation about immigrants as good vs. evil, criminals vs. law abiding citizens, and chaos vs. safety. All undocumented immigrants, by his reasoning, were to be seen first as criminals before anything else.
This gives cover for Trump and his MAGA loyalists to never address the more nuanced, push-pull issues of migration. It allows them to never entertain the thought of creating a more just, expansive immigration policy like the one memorialized in the inscription at Ellis Island, “Give me your tired…” It gives permission to their followers to disregard the precepts of Scripture regarding migrants.
It is why Trump wants to keep the issue alive, not to solve the challenge of migration, but to stoke fear in the nation that they are “coming to get you.”
A Vacuum of Moral Leadership
This cynical move has shifted the Overton Window so far toward fascist authoritarianism that even progressive and Democratic lawmakers and commentators have adopted more hardline views to reflect public sentiment. There are now no widely viewed public forums with anyone advocating for an immigration policy that follows the biblical principles of treating immigrants like citizens (Leviticus 19:34) or of treating neighbors as ourselves (Luke 10:27).
For all their faults (and there were many), Reagan and Bush understood that leadership requires a delicate balance between reflecting and shaping the views of constituents on complex subjects. If a citizen didn’t begin from the premise that all people are worthy of dignity and respect, then they would.
Now, it seems that there is no one in public life willing to assert this fundamental truth. And so, it must fall on people of good faith to stand in the gap and say, without equivocation, that rounding up children, raiding workplaces and deporting our hardworking neighbors, and pushing migrants further into the shadows is demonic, un-Christian, and unworthy of a nation built by immigrants.
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Senior Editor at Good Faith Media.
