A bipartisan effort would be possible, he said, if Obama "would take amnesty off the table and make a real commitment to border and interior security."īut Simpson, a fellow Republican who served in the Senate with McConnell from 1986 to 1997, says calling for tighter borders is a tried-and-true tactic of politicians unwilling to confront the realities of a growing illegal population. President Obama's call for bipartisanship on the immigration issue was answered by Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell. More than 20 years later, the Republican Party has changed its tune. Now, Amnesty Is Out Border Security Is In "I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and lived here, even though sometime back they may have entered illegally," he said. Reagan said as much himself in a televised debate with Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale in 1984. "It was in Ronald Reagan's bones - it was part of his understanding of America - that the country was fundamentally open to those who wanted to join us here." Peter Robinson, a former Reagan speechwriter, agrees. "Anybody who's here illegally is going to be abused in some way, either financially physically. Reagan "knew that it was not right for people to be abused," Simpson says. Simpson, however, sees a different person in the president he called a "dear friend." Sean Hannity of Fox News even has a regular segment called "What Would Reagan Do?" Nowadays, conservative commentators like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh often invoke the former president as a champion of the conservative agenda. If you can bring one person out of an exploited relationship, that's good enough for me." "It's not perfect, but 2.9 million people came forward. Simpson says the amnesty provision actually saved the act from being a total loss. The law granted amnesty to nearly 3 million illegal immigrants, yet was largely considered unsuccessful because the strict sanctions on employers were stripped out of the bill for passage. "And everybody fell asleep lightly for a while, and we were able to do legalization." "We used the word 'legalization,' " former Wyoming Sen. However, one of the lead authors of the bill says that unlike most immigration reform efforts of the past 20 years, amnesty wasn't the pitfall.
Part of this aversion is due to what is widely seen as the failure of Reagan's 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act.
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