> Reagan got rolled by Congress <
Absolutely correct. But in Reagan’s defense, he was talking about orderly and legal immigration here. I’m sure he could not imagine what a huge free-for-all illegal immigration would be.
No checking for criminal backgrounds. No checking for diseases. No checking whatsoever.
He was right. Back then, the Nation and its institutions supported and required assimilation. You could be a recent immigrant and be greeted with a unanimous influence to drop old legion es and adopt. new one. Keep your religion and your folk dances and even your language at home, but your life was oriented to a new loyalty. None of that happens anymore.
We all got rolled by an education system that doesn’t manage to teach Americans to be Americans, let alone illegal immigrants.
Reagan on scammed by congress and to quote his favorite president Coolidge “ New arrivals should be limited to our capacity to absorb them into the ranks of good citizenship. America must be kept American. For this purpose, it is necessary to continue a policy of restricted immigration”
And Calvin Coolidge was definitely not a racist or anything , he knew that you can’t let in more people than you could Americanized
Now we have Americans who don’t even believe in America anymore so how can we hope foreigners to care?
Reagan was naive.
This country is built on a house of cards that will only remain standing as long as we keep adding more cards to it.
Divide the national debt by the working population in this country, and you'll find that your average married couple with a family is carrying something like $408,000 in Federal debt. That's like carrying a mortgage without having a place to live.
We've reached the point where we have opened the immigration floodgates because we desperately need more people who are dumb enough to sign up for that deal.
There’s a difference between a country carefully metering immigration, and protecting its borders which is its right, versus a veritable tidal wave of illegal aliens, their home countries wish to be rid of, breaking the border over years and years and substantially eroding the demographics of a nation, in order to be provided benefits paid for by citizens whose lives this tidal wave is negatively affecting. A government which allows the latter has lost complete legitimacy. Yet the sharp distinction between these two scenarios continues to be lost on almost everyone elected to public office.
His dream fell flat on day one. He had a Utopian idea about the efficacy of immigration w/o consideration for the character of the new arrivals.
I have long argued that we owe our success as a nation primarily to two things: the remarkable quality of our immigrants and a Constitution that gave them the freedom to succeed.
For most of our history, until the middle of the 20th century when commercial airlines began, most people who immigrated to the U.S. were forced to say goodbye to everyone and everything that they had ever known, to take a long journey to somewhere that they had never been, just for the opportunity to work themselves to death for the rest of their lives and hopefully provide better lives for their children.
Average people don’t do that. Normal people don’t do that. Only extraordinary people do that. It was a form of Darwinian selection with only the most extraordinary people choosing to come here.
We still need immigrants, but we must be selective. There are 8 billion people in the world today. Half of them would come to the U S. tomorrow if they could. That is not nationalistic bravado but simple recognition of the fact that over half the world lives in conditions that are far worse than the worst imaginable poverty in the U.S., living on a few dollars a day without access to clean water or sanitation.
I like to ask liberals how many of the world’s 8 billion people we should allow in tomorrow. Unless their answer is “all of them” then that raises the questions of how many and which ones. IMHO a game of “Whoever makes it across the border alive first wins” is not a good way to answer either question.
Yes. They can.
We're having serious problems with people who come to America illegally, for felonious purposes, with no intention whatsoever of becoming American.
That's the difference between an immigrant and an invader.