I thought it was poor
judgment on the part of President Reagan. He let us down on a principle
of the rule of law. Thirty-plus years ago I knew that we would be
fighting for a long, long time to restore the respect for the rule of
law, particularly with regard to immigration. When I watched the debate take place here in this Congress and in the
House and in the Senate and I read what I could read about that, I
reasoned that, even though we were losing in the House, the rule of law
was losing in the House on the amnesty debate in 1986, and even though
the rule of law lost in the Senate, I was confident that Ronald Reagan
understood the principle that, if you reward people for breaking the
law, there would have been more people that break the law. If you say that this is the last amnesty ever, you also will have to
continually fight the argument of we didn't really mean that; there are
these other circumstances.
Keywords matched
immigration