The immigration issue wasn’t a new one during recent campaigns.
Despite the fact President Ronald Reagan signed the last amnesty bill—“I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and lived here, even though some time back they may have entered illegally,” Reagan said in 1984—many conservatives were now solidly committed to building a big fence on the border with Mexico and shipping back the estimated eleven million illegal residents in the country.
Perhaps the most sensible answer to this immigration question, in my view anyway, came during an interview with a national politician you’d probably least suspect.
In 2002, while doing a story on the growing number of deaths on the U.S./Mexico border by people attempting to enter the country illegally, I asked former vice president Dan Quayle about our border policy.
He answered: “One of the things I have urged throughout my life in politics and speaking on public policy issues is to concentrate on economic development south of the border. Because if you have good jobs, a better quality of life, there will be more of a tendency to stay in your neighborhood.”
In other words, instead of taking years to build a great big wall that will never be high enough, and spend billions of tax dollars on increased border patrol that will never be enough, just help stabilize northern Mexico’s economy.
Quayle’s theory is, people and families who can find jobs and a steady income will not feel the necessity to risk everything— including their lives—to come here illegally.
Imagine if we had spent the last fifteen years doing what Quayle proposed instead of all the endless bickering we’ve witnessed that still has us nowhere near solving the problem.
From my book Front Row Seat at the Circus.