Thirty years ago Reagan agreed to amnesty under the assumption democrats would honor their promises, they did not.

In 1986 I voted for the Simpson-Mazzoli immigration bill because we were told it would solve the problem of massive illegal immigration. In his diaries, President Ronald Reagan said he was going to sign the bill because we had to regain control of our borders. The Simpson-Mazzoli bill contained three promises:

1. The government would make a concerted effort to control the borders.
2. An effective employer verification program would ensure that only legal workers were hired.
3. One-time amnesty would be granted for people illegally in the United States.

All three promises were broken. The government has made no serious effort to control our borders. Employers continue knowingly to hire illegal immigrants without any real fear of punishment. Source: Real Change, by Newt Gingrich, p.126 , Dec 18, 2007

Believing that government would adhere to their promise wasn’t the big mistake. The biggie was believing the numbers.

The most important lesson from that last amnesty is that the numbers presented by the government will be wildly underestimated. When it was passed, the pols said the high number for amnesty was a million. It turned out to be 3.2 million. This was not due to deception. It was ignorance. The people writing these bills rely on lobbyists who lie on spec. Just listen to the current presidential candidates talk and it is clear they don’t know the first thing about the topic.

The easy thing to do is look at the last amnesty. If they were off by a factor of three the last time, we’re looking at close to 25 million this time. The last time they based the one million figure on total illegal population, not just those working. That means the 25 million could very well be a low estimate as well.

My own sense is Bush will collude with Boehner and McConnell to pass an amnesty of some sort. They will have to couch it in different terms and tart it up with phoney-baloney enforcement language. The result will be the same. We will see 30-40 million foreigners handed citizenship papers by the end of the decade.

You better get working on your Spanish, esé. Keep Reading….