Who said the following?
Credibility in immigration policy can be summed up in one sentence: those who should get in, get in; those who should be kept out, are kept out; and those who should not be here will be required to leave.
Donald Trump? Stephen Miller? Incoming “border czar” Tom Homan?
No—civil rights icon Barbara Jordan in 1995.
Jordan, the first Black congresswoman from the South and a star of the Watergate hearings, was named by President Clinton to head an immigration commission some 30 years ago. It is precisely because her recommendations were ignored that we are where we are today. The lack of credibility that Jordan bemoaned is how you get a man like Trump.
The bottom line is that a large-scale program to make illegal aliens leave doesn’t require soldiers breaking down doors, cattle cars, or concentration camps. This is law enforcement, not war. And it is imperative in light not just of the past four years of immigration mismanagement, but the past four decades of dishonesty.
Decades of unwillingness to enforce immigration laws were driven by the desire of some for cheap, controllable labor, and of others for a new client class that would shift political power to the Democratic Party. The culmination of that process under Biden became entwined with the identity of the party and its ideological activists who sincerely believe that national borders are an expression of racism and that turning away foreigners who want to move here illegally is immoral. The belief in unlimited, lawless immigration has become a litmus-test issue for the activist left, like hostility to the existence of law enforcement itself.
And because most voters naturally consider that insane, we now see broad public support, including among first-generation migrants, for “mass deportation” and an electoral mandate for what the president-elect has promised will be the “largest deportation effort in American history.”
Restoring credibility after decades of deceit will take time, cost money, get tied up in courts, and inevitably involve an unfortunate measure of human suffering, the images of which will be ruthlessly exploited for political purposes by the media and the interests they serve. But it’s neither the Manhattan Project nor the D-Day landings—it’s simply a matter of enforcing existing law consistently and without apology, which is the legal and popular mandate the American people have given the incoming administration.
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