Cecilia Muñoz and Frank Sharry’s conceit that ‘comprehensive immigration reform’ represents the ‘middle way’ has been disproven time and again.
The Atlantic has published a piece by two eminences grises of the Left’s mass immigration project arguing that the Left’s mass immigration project is responsible for the election of Trump.
Great news, right? Joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, no?
No.
You can see why casual readers might read the article as a notable and encouraging sign. The authors, longtime activists Cecilia Muñoz and Frank Sharry, write, “We believe that immigration has become a losing issue for Democrats over the past decade because elected leaders have followed progressive advocates to the left, beyond the political space available to them.”
Except that the authors are two of the progressive activists most responsible for the poisoning of our immigration politics, and they repent of nothing. They complain about the “militant demands” and “confrontational tactics” of their immigration-activist allies, painting themselves as “pragmatists” favoring “moderation.”
But their moderate, pragmatic solution is just the same tired old “comprehensive immigration reform” (CIR) — i.e., fraudulent promises of future enforcement in exchange for up-front amnesty and hugely increased legal immigration — the pursuit of which is why we’re here in the first place.
It was precisely repeated bipartisan efforts to pass this dishonest package that helped delegitimize our nation’s leadership class. It wasn’t the 2009 Tea Party eruption that marked the beginning of the populist wave we’re now in, but the pushback against the McCain/Kennedy/Bush amnesty program that failed spectacularly in 2007, when outraged citizens (led by National Review and Numbers USA) crashed the Senate’s telephone system with their tsunami of outrage.
Distrust of leadership-class shenanigans on immigration was reinforced when the Senate tried again several years later, passing the Gang of Eight monstrosity in 2013, which Speaker John Boehner wouldn’t bring up for a vote in the House precisely because of his justified fear of the voter response (a decision that was sealed when House GOP Majority Leader Eric Cantor lost his primary to an immigration hawk).
It’s especially rich that this argument is being offered by Sharry and Muñoz. Their testimony would be genuinely persuasive if they acknowledged the error of their earlier ways, accepted their own culpability, and proposed a truly different approach. But what they’re really saying is that their activist allies simply sought to boil the frog too quickly, leading the public to jump out of the pot and elect Trump.
They write that, with the failure of the Gang of Eight bill, “The pro-immigrant movement began to splinter; advocates, frustrated with the failure of a coalition that had included unions, business, law enforcement, and churches, moved swiftly left.” But Sharry did exactly this after the failure of the previous amnesty effort, under Bush, when he left the National Immigration Forum, which pretended to represent such a coalition, and founded the unapologetically hard-left anti-borders group America’s Voice.
And, as Mickey Kaus noted on Twitter, “Calling immigration-control advocates ‘racist’ has been a particular @FrankSharry specialty.”
Muñoz is even more central to the derangement of our immigration politics.
The ur-betrayal was the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, or IRCA. The “grand bargain” at the center of the law traded amnesty for nearly 3 million illegal aliens in exchange for promises of future enforcement — specifically, the first-ever legal prohibition against the employment of illegal aliens (it was explicitly legal until then).
A few years after IRCA was passed, with the amnesty part of the bargain mostly completed, Senators Ted Kennedy and Orrin Hatch got together to try to welsh on the other side of the bargain by restoring the legal ability to hire illegal aliens. They coordinated this with the National Council of La Raza (since renamed UnidosUS because of the racist stench of the original name), which released a report calling for the repeal of the hiring ban.
The author of that report?
None other than Cecilia Muñoz.
Kennedy, Hatch, and Muñoz failed to formally repeal employer sanctions because Coretta Scott King stopped them, arguing publicly that the ban on hiring illegals was necessary to protect the bargaining power of black workers.
But while the ban remained on the books, enforcement of it was abandoned, reaching a low point in 2004, when only three employers were fined for knowingly hiring illegals.
The fallout from this I’ll-gladly-pay-you-Tuesday-for-a-hamburger-today bait and switch continues to infect our immigration politics, rightly discrediting the claims of “comprehensive immigration reform” hawkers like Sharry and Muñoz.
Their conceit that CIR represents the “middle way” has been disproven time and again. Their claim that voters want “more control and more compassion; more order and more immigration; strict limits and wider legal pathways” is bunk. When presented with the actual level of legal immigration, and offered alternative numbers, about half choose a reduction of 50 percent or more from the current level of 1 million legal immigrants per year. (See the last few slides here.)
The authors’ approach is a middle way only between the genuine views of the Left and a straw man on the right: “The right argues to kick out and keep out all immigrants. The Left argues to let all comers stay.”
The real middle way is unapologetic enforcement, up front and without preconditions. Only after that’s proven (not promised) and the illegal population has shrunk significantly, can you move on to the grand bargain: a simple, rip-off-the-band-aid amnesty for the remaining non-violent illegals in exchange for deep, permanent cuts to future legal immigration.
Sharry and Muñoz call their piece “How Democrats Lost Their Way on Immigration”. It might be better titled “Real CIR Has Never Been Tried!”
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me four times. . . .