Obama Wants Conservatives to Know that Immigration Reform Won’t Be a Rerun of 1986

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


What are the odds that immigration reform will pass? Opposition has already started to mobilize from, among others, Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby, who noted the other day, “We’ve seen this movie before — 27 years ago, remember?” Ed Kilgore comments:

Shelby, of course, is alluding to a “scandal” that most people outside conservative activist circles are at best dimly aware of: the 1986 immigration law that sold “amnesty” under the false flag of reform.

I guess this is true: most people who are neither conservative activists nor political junkies don’t really remember the 1986 immigration bill. But make no mistake: it’s profoundly driven the approach toward immigration reform from both left and right. Among tea partyish conservatives, the 1986 bill is universally considered one of the great betrayals of all time. They were promised tougher border security in return for a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, but in the end they got only a wave of newly legalized immigrants flooding into their towns and schools. The tougher border security was a mirage, discarded almost immediately, which naturally led to yet another new wave of Mexicans crossing the border illegally and yet another call for a path to citizenship for them. As far as conservatives are concerned, they were played for suckers in 1986, and they’re not going to fall for this con again.

President Obama has done his best to blunt this anger by spending his first term getting tough on undocumented immigrants. E-Verify has been ramped up; deportations have become harsher and more intensive; fences have been built; and funding for the border patrol has been increased. Liberals have been incensed with much of this, but the result—with a big assist from the recession—has been a sharp decline in illegal immigration over the past few years. Generally speaking, Obama’s entire strategy with immigration reform has revolved around proving that he doesn’t plan a rerun of 1986. This time, he’s saying, there really will be tougher border security and tougher employer checks to go along with the path to citizenship.

Will this work? Conservatives have not been notably willing to credit Obama with much good faith in the past, and even Marco Rubio can only do so much to change that. Nevertheless, this has been the plan all along, and now we get to see if it works. If Obama can convince enough conservatives that he’ll be tougher than Reagan on border security, then immigration reform has a chance. If not, it will probably fail.

WE'LL BE BLUNT:

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't find elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't find elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate