Amnesty for illegalsFollow

Hitler tried annexing the rest of his continent, why do you love hitler?

Fucking WOPs...

icwatudidthar

'Grats on Googling a map!

Yet he still missed a few...

I just found out this weekend that Ronald Reagan granted amnesty to almost 3 million illegal immigrants in 1986. And, apparently, when debating Mondale in 1984, he said, "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."

Huh. I feel rather silly for not knowing that.

You honestly didn't know that? It's one of the two things for which most conservatives will criticize Reagan (I turned that around just for you Nobby!). The counter argument was that if we did grant amnesty, it would only serve to increase the incentive to use illegal entry into the US as a way of short cutting the immigration process resulting in an increase in illegal border crossings and an increase in the total number of people living here illegally. Which ended out being exactly right. A dozen years after his amnesty, the number of illegals estimated in the US ballooned to 12 million.

It failed pretty spectacularly at "fixing" the problem. Conservative opposition to amnesty isn't based on some knee jerk anti-immigrant bigotry. It's based on the fact that not only did it not work the last time we tried it, it made the problem worse.

In this case, "a few" is two.

There are six countries between Mexico and Panama. You missed Guatemala and Belize. To be fair, you don't need to go through Belize to get to Panama from Mexico, but you can bypass El Salvador as well.

It had a lot to do with how many stayed in the US illegally instead of returning to Mexico after a period of time. There are always other factors, but everything else being the same, the expectation that another amnesty might show up certainly weighed in on decisions made by those seeking work in the US in the late 80s and early 90s.



We were talking about the impact of amnesty on the equation. If we'd been talking about general causes of illegal immigration, I would certainly list "economic differential" up at the top of the list in terms of factors. In fact, I mention that every single time I talk about why just building a border fence isn't sufficient and why we need some form of guest worker program.

If we're talking about the Reagan Amnesty, I'll talk about the effect of the amnesty. I don't think that's "simple-minded".



I've yet to ever hear a conservative argue that they have to dial 1 for English because of amnesty. That's a much larger aspect of the whole immigration issue. I was just talking about why Conservatives oppose amnesty as an issue position today. Given that I can only assume the reason Belk brought it up was to suggest that there was something strange that conservatives opposed it today, but Reagan was a supporter of the idea back in the day, this would seem to be relevant.

Edited, Jul 6th 2010 5:22pm by gbaji

Except that what I actually said was that the counter argument against amnesty predicted that it would encourage more people to cross the border illegally and result in a larger number of illegals living in the US over time. I followed that up with an observation that their prediction came true. The existence of other factors is irrelevant to the correctness of the prediction, and may even have been taken into account. There are always "other factors" involved, and just because I can't predict ahead of time which ones might occur doesn't remove the overall effect something like an amnesty has on the equation.

Some of us (that's conservatives btw) actually do anticipate that things aren't going to stay exactly the same over time and take those things into account. It's why we can so consistently predict the abject failure of most of the spending programs which liberals support. We assume that someone will cheat the system in new and interesting ways, or that some other effects will come along and make it not work. And it's amazing how often we're right!



Really? How many have you actually heard say that? The only people I hear saying that are liberals telling us what they think conservatives are saying. Kinda like what you're doing right now...

You're not really this dumb, right? Do we have to explain yet again how correlation does not imply causation? If you can't isolate the other effects, then no, you can't say that the amnesty had anything at all to do with there being more illegal immigrants in the future.

Not really relevant though. I'm talking about conservatives understanding that by making one change, other things will change as well. It's one of the reasons why conservatives tend to oppose making changes, especially to things which have a potentially significant social and economic impact. It's not that we oppose change for the sake of opposing change, but that we recognize that it's hard if not impossible to predict all the effects which will occur.

It's bad enough when the things which occur really are unpredictable and come at us from no-where. The sad bits are when conservatives can clearly see what will happen if we make X change, tell everyone it will happen, are told we're just using fear tactics or slippery slope arguments, X change is done anyway, and then exactly what we predicted would happen does happen. You'd think that at some point, people might just start looking at that track record and thinking "Hey! Maybe we should listen to these people...?".

Wishful thinking I suppose.

Never go outside, or you will get struck by lightning!

Edited, Jul 6th 2010 9:09pm by Bardalicious