OPINION:
The elites thought they were entitled by divine right (though many deny an authentic divinity) to run things forever, and Donald Trump gave them the shock of their lives just by winning the election. Now they’re getting a more painful aftershock. The man actually meant those campaign promises.
Americans have been conditioned by politicians, Republicans as well as Democrats, liberals and conservatives, to understand that a promise is just that, a promise, and there are always reasons why it can’t actually be redeemed.
With several strokes of his pen, the president Wednesday issued executive orders that eviscerated Barack Obama’s immigration directives, protection for so-called “sanctuary cities and counties” and restraints on border-patrol officers that Mr. Obama intended to leave as part of his legacy.
“From here on out I’m asking all of you to enforce the laws of the United States,” he told the Homeland Security Department, delivering the instructions live and in person. “They will be enforced, and enforced strongly. We do not need new laws. We will work within the existing system and framework.”
This is the pushback against the flabby enforcement of the immigration laws that many wanted but few dared expect. Immigration laws have been treated as cafeteria fare for decades — presidential administrations have enforced the laws they liked, or tolerated, and ignored the rest. The result has been chaos on the border, as thousands of would-be immigrants concluded that the United States, the big rock candy mountain of immigrant dreams the world over, had no will to protect the culture that draws “[the] tired, [the] poor and the huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” in Emma Lazarus’ iconic poem, to America in the first place. But since the huddled masses can’t all be accommodated, not all at once, the nation had always reserved the right to choose who could come in, when, and how.
Until recent decades, when the Democrats learned they could treat the border as a giant ATM machine dispensing prospective voters instead of dollars, and certain Republicans saw an open border as a source of cheap and easily abused labor, immigration laws controlled the orderly assimilation of those “tired, poor and huddled masses.” Soon they were no longer tired, poor and huddled.
Advocates for illegal immigrants can hardly be blamed for thinking the chaos would go on forever, and they rushed to protect the chaos as if forever might one day be rescinded. That is what is happening now, with Donald Trump as the promised rescinder-in-chief.
Some of the “immigration advocates,” who have been encouraged to think that America’s borders should be kept open permanently, plan to rally at the White House, with marches, speeches and loud music, arguing that U.S. law is broken and can’t be enforced and the United States might as well submit to the inevitable. They want the government to curtail the threat of deportation until deportations are ended forever.
His executive orders on Wednesday were Donald Trump’s answer. He leaves in place, at least for now, Barack Obama’s 2012 amnesty for children, many now in their third decade or later, who were brought here illegally by their parents.
Another executive order would dry up federal money grants to cities and counties that, acting as if they were sovereign nations, refuse to cooperate with law-enforcement agents dispatched to enforce the law. Still another ordered the appropriate government departments to get cracking on building “the wall” that the new administration said again yesterday Mexico would pay for, “one way or another.”
Donald Trump was mocked during the late campaign as a political naf who promised things that couldn’t be done. Some of those wise guys might be glad now they weren’t laying down bets.
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