Republican Florida Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar is an open borders RINO. She might as well change political parties.
A group of congressional Republicans have joined Democrats in an effort to push through an amnesty bill by performing two cheap tricks: repeat the tired trope that we’re a “nation of immigrants” and redefine “amnesty” as “dignity.”
The bipartisan bill, dubbed the DIGNITY Act, was introduced this week by Republican Florida Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar, who has lately been on a media tour to promote what she calls, falsely, “a revolutionary bill that offers the solution to our immigration crisis.”
But of course Salazar’s bill isn’t “revolutionary,” and it doesn’t offer a solution to our immigration crisis. It offers amnesty wrapped in platitudes. The key part of the bill is an “earned opportunity for long-term immigrants to stay here and work.” How long-term? Five years. That means people who illegally snuck across our border as recently as 2020 would be allowed to remain in the United States forever — without any of the obligations and responsibilities that come with full citizenship. That’s amnesty, no matter what Salazar says.
It’s also a miscarriage of the rule of law. As my colleague Brianna Lyman noted yesterday, “no one deserves to be rewarded for violating our sovereign borders simply because they want to ‘pay taxes’ and ‘work.’” Billions of people all over the world would very much like to come here and pay taxes and work, our laws be damned. But our economy is not a possession of the world, it belongs to the American people. Foreign access to it, to the extent we allow it at all, should first and foremost serve the interests of the American people, not a contingent of foreigners who managed to get into our country and remain here for at least seven years without getting caught.
Lyman also correctly pointed out that we tried this one-time amnesty gambit before, in President Ronald Reagan’s 1986 immigration reform that gave amnesty to nearly three million illegals in exchange for vague promises about border security, which of course never materialized. When promoting his immigration reform, Reagan trotted out the line that we’re a “nation of immigrants,” which is exactly what Republican Rep. Mike Lawler said in support of the DIGNITY Act this week.
This is wrong. We’re not a nation of immigrants, we’re a nation of settlers. The people who founded America came to settle it, and settle it they did. They were not immigrating to an established nation, they were forging a nation out of a vast, largely unpopulated wilderness. Those who came after, in subsequent waves throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most often pushed west, further into the wilderness, expanding the frontier of our nation and settling it along the way. Indeed the phrase itself, “nation of immigrants,” is nonsense. Immigrants by definition don’t create a nation, they become part of an established nation by assimilating into it. READ MORE