Saturday, the Wall Street Journal breathlessly stated, “The restrictionist wing of the GOP simply wants no new immigration, and “amnesty” is merely a political slogan to kill any reform,” without citing a single member of that wing. Their readers were not happy. No wonder. It is a phony charge, as Mark Levin points out:
The “restrictionist wing” of the GOP? We’re “restrictionists” because we want border security first, which we’ve not had for four decades? We’re “restrictionists” because we want the 1986 comprehensive immigration reform law enforced, the same law championed by the Journal back then? We’re “restrictionists” because we’re concerned about the costs to entitlement programs, public education, and the health care system? We’re “restrictionists” because we want Congress to go through the usual legislative process to examine the many, many details of this deal and ensure they’re carefully considered, rather than negotiating the deal in secret, giving certain groups veto power over provisions, and then ramming it through on the floor?
To ignore or reject all the publicly available evidence of security and cost-related issues associated with a deal like this, and they are numerous and serious, is to diminish the credibility of the editorial writers at the Journal who write this stuff. They’re beginning to sound like big-spending, soft-on-security liberals.
The “restrictionist wing” of the GOP is called the conservative movement. We believe in things like the Constitution, which is full of restrictions. I thought our friends at the Journal editorial page believed that the size and growth of entitlements should be restricted. I guess not, since Robert Rector at The Heritage Foundation points out that this deal will destroy Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid even faster than projected. I would have thought that after 9/11 the Journal editorial page would want to better restrict the manner in which aliens come to our country. I thought they understood that Homeland Security, and ICE in particular, were bureaucratic disasters largely incapable of competently implementing an extremely complex new set of immigration requirements. I guess they now believe otherwise, contrary to numerous GAO and other studies. But this is why so many “restrictionists” insist on more physical and technological barriers to slow illegal entrance into our country.
What we want is for both parties to stop illegal immigration and to secure our borders. When they prove they are serious about doing those two things first, then we can discuss those who broke the law to get here.