President Ronald Reagan
“I've said on a number of occasions that I can't help but believe—you can call it mysticism if you will—that God must have placed this land here between the oceans to be found by a certain kind of people and a kind only in one thing: that whatever corner of the world they came from, they had the courage—and the desire for freedom that went with it—to uproot themselves and come to this strange land, beginning back when it was the most underdeveloped land in the world, and come here leaving family and come to a strange language and everything that went with that kind of a move.
“Many who passed through the gates at Ellis Island had little more than what they carried with them, yet they possessed a determination that with hard work and freedom, they would live a better life and their children even more so. They were captured by the American dream. And both they and their new country were the better for their efforts and their faith, because they not only came here for something but just as they came from every corner of the world, they brought something from every corner of the world to this great melting pot. And maybe in so doing, they proved how artificial are the prejudices and the hatreds that exist in the world, because we proved that we could all mix ...”
Remarks Announcing the Formation of the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Centennial Commission, May 18, 1982
“...it makes one wonder about the illegal alien fuss. Are great numbers of our unemployed really victims of the illegal alien invasion or are those illegal tourists actually doing work our own people won't do? One thing is certain in this hungry world; no regulation or law should be allowed if it results in crops rotting in the fields for lack of harvesters.”
From a Radio Address entitled "Apples," dated November 29, 1977.
"I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it and see it still."
Farewell Address January 11, 1989
"You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman; you can go to live in Germany, you cannot become a German— or a Turk, or a Greek, or whatever. But anyone, from any corner of the world, can come to live in America and become an American."
"You have to realize that we are a people that are made up of every strain, nationality, and race of the world. And the result is that when people in our country think someone is being mistreated or treated unjustly in another country, these are people who still feel that kinship to that country because that is their heritage. In America, whenever you meet someone new and become friends, one of the first things you tell each other is what your bloodline is. For example, when I'm asked, I have to say Irish, English, and Scotch—English and Scotch on my mother's side, Irish on my father's side. But all of them have that."
"Well, when you take on to yourself a wife, you do not stop loving your mother. So, Americans all feel a kind of a kinship to that country that their parents or their grandparents or even some great-grandparents came from; you don't lose that contact."
Question-and-answer session with the students and faculty at Moscow State University, May 31, 1988
Holdonnow!
PresReagan didn't support open borders. Reagan said: "A nation without borders is not a nation." When the Immigration Reform and Control Act 1986 was signed into law there were 2-3 million illegals in the US. Today there are 12-15 million illegals living in the US. The IRCA was meant to be a one time only amnesty deal, with serious employer sanctions for hiring illegals. If Reagan were around today, he would take a far different position on the illegal immigration issue then he did 20 years ago. Besides, we don't need to make the same mistake again.
From FoxNews, June 10 2004
In exchange for legal status for the group, Reagan insisted that the magnet attracting illegal aliens to the United States be removed by extinguishing any incentive for U.S. employers to hire illegal aliens. In tandem with the amnesty, Reagan campaigned for employer sanctions for hiring illegal aliens, sanctions so stringent that many at the time regarded them as draconian.
Reagan reasoned that if an employer were fined for hiring an illegal alien (as much as $1 million in the worst cases), any payroll savings achieved by the hiring would be wiped out by the fine. In effect, it would be more expensive to hire illegal aliens than to hire Americans or lawful permanent residents. The few illegal aliens who continued to take the gamble and cross the border would be intercepted by a robust and more generously funded Border Patrol.
While Reagan’s 1986 immigration reforms can at least be called rational, they were a failure. Today, there are between 8 million and 11 million illegal aliens in the United States. The majority of them crossed our southern border and has found employment — illegal employment, but employment nonetheless. This is attributed to Sen. Ted Kennedy’s eventual gutting of the enforcement mechanism for Reagan's employer sanctions, and successive administrations refusing to give our Border Patrol the resources it needs to achieve its mission.
In 1986, though, President Reagan showed a clear recognition between wrong and right. If U.S. employers were to gain from the employment of people whose very presence in our country was a crime, then they would at least have to pay for it.
How far we’ve come since 1986. At the moment, there are two amnesty bills pending in Congress, and both predicate an illegal aliens’ eligibility on the very thing that President Reagan fought so hard to stamp out: illegal alien employment.