If Ronald Reagan Raised His Head

Pay attention to the words of the President of the United States:

“Our objective is only to establish a reasonable, fair and orderly and secure system of immigration into this country and not to discriminate in any way against particular nations or people. The legalization provisions in this act will go far to improve the lives of a class of individuals who now must hide in the shadows, without access to many of the benefits of a free and open society. Very soon many of these men and women will be able to step into the sunlight and, ultimately, if they choose, they may become Americans.”

What noble words from President Barack Obama! They are worthy of the leader of a nation who became great thanks to the efforts of its immigrants, as the Democrat has reiterated each time he pretends (unsuccessfully) to move his immigration reform forward. But, just a minute… did I say Obama? Sorry, I meant to say Reagan. In fact, these are the words of President Ronald Reagan, the hero of the American right, the model for the present leaders of the Republican Party.

Unfortunately, memory is short and selective. It remembers what is convenient and hides what is not. At the Republican National Convention in Tampa none of the leaders talked about the humanitarian gesture that President Reagan made in that long past Nov 6, 1986 when he promoted an amnesty act that legalized three million undocumented immigrants, giving them citizenship and most of all dignity, such as had happened before with the millions and millions of people who came to the United States in successive waves, escaping from wars and misery.

Why, then, has immigration become a problem of national security, as the Republicans warn? Basically because in a time of crisis we have to look for enemies to blame for everything; for the Republicans, those who were welcomed before to do the jobs that Americans did not want to do are now undesirable because employment is scarce, and they should be deported or “self-deported,” as the Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney proposes.

In the quarter-century since the Reagan amnesty, at least during the first 15 years, federal and state authorities turned a blind eye to the unstoppable flow of immigrants who crossed the southern border and were received with open arms by employers who urgently needed cheap labor. The powerful United States economy absorbed without a problem the arrival of thousands of workers who formed families and became a marginalized undocumented minority of some 11 million. At that time the country flourished and money flowed without problems, including funds used to satisfy the drug addictions of an ever greater number of Americans. Not only were there people crossing the river from the border; there was also tons of cocaine.

But when the crisis exploded four years ago the destruction of employment began, affecting all the economic sectors — all except the sector of illegal narcotics trafficking, since the addicted continued to be hooked on drugs, to the satisfaction of the cartels based in Mexico and their branches in the United States.

It was then that many Republican politicians took advantage of the increasing social discontent that the recession provoked, not to attack the financial speculators, responsible for the crisis, but rather to signal as guilty those “without papers” — and President Obama for aiming to legalize them, although deep down he is trying to do the same thing that Reagan did. With all possible bad faith they adopted an openly xenophobic and anti-Hispanic discourse, in which they try to confuse public opinion by putting “illegal” immigrants and drug traffickers in the same bag, as if everyone who came from “the other side of the border” were a mere criminal.

That is how anti-immigrant laws were born in Arizona or Alabama, propelled by Republican governors who accused the federal government of not doing anything to end the problem; and that is how, poisoned by the aggressive discourse of the tea party, the delegates of the Tampa convention approved a radical electoral platform, which says the following with regard to combating illegal immigration: “In an age of terrorism, drug cartels, human trafficking and criminal gangs, the presence of millions of unidentified persons in this country poses grave risks to the safety and the sovereignty of the United States.”

It is not strange that the ambassador to Mexico in Washington, Arturo Sarukhan, is worried by the “xenophobic stench” that emanates from Tampa, where the Republicans scream for the construction of a border wall and harsher laws against illegal immigration — while at the same time they flatly refuse to toughen laws against arm sales, which are then used to commit killings on both sides of the border.

This is, then, the reality: The Republican Party has been swallowed up by the extreme right, who denies its tolerant past with immigrants— and this is the same party whose members once included, even though it is now difficult to believe, the antislavery president Abraham Lincoln and the liberal New York governor Nelson Rockefeller.

If Ronald Reagan raised his head and saw the radical drift that his party is falling into, he would vote for Obama in November.