Of course Obama has made it worse, but there is a lot of blame to spread around. The seeds were planted with the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act which was passed behind a series of false promises, and unleashed mass immigration after decades of low-moderate levels. The results were clear by the 1980s that the bill was doing exactly what it’s sponsors said it wouldn’t do, but that was an era of GOP landslides, so maybe the threat was ignored.
The first President Bush made matters worse with another Ted Kennedy backed reform in 1990 that expanded immigration even more, in part by creating the absurd Diversity Lottery visas, which serve to kick off more chain migration.
In the mid-90s there was an attempt at conservative comprehensive immigration reform, complete with a significant reduction in legal immigration via a clamp down on chain migration. Who knows if Clinton would have signed an intact Smith-Simpson bill because it was undermined by liberal-on-immigration Republicans like Sam Brownback, Dick Armey, Spence Abraham, and a staffer named Paul Ryan. It never made it to Clinton to sign or veto.
After 9-11, the second Bush could have pursued conservative immigration reform, but instead he tried to pass amnesty and a massive increase in legal immigration. Some Republican supporters of those bills said they would have ended chain migration, but only after an enormous decades long increase to ‘clear the backlog’. And needless to say, Bush made no effort to reduce the amount of refugee/asylum admissions, even though law gives the President a lot of authority in setting annual numbers.
It’d be great if support and opposition to mass immigration split evenly down party lines, because then there could be a true battle over it. But while the Democrats have become uniformly in favor of mass immigration because of it’s importation of future voters, the GOP has been and remains divided. For every Senator Sessions, there is a loathsome creature like Senator Graham.
Bookmarked.