The following editorial first appeared in the Augusta Chronicle:
“Our immigration system has been broken for decades, and the president is doing his job to address the problems that he can with his executive authority.”
That’s from the White House.
But it’s not from this past weekend.
It’s from November 2014, from a summary released ahead of President Obama’s address to the nation about immigration.
So before you start (or continue) fuming over the sequence of events surrounding President Trump’s executive order Friday on refugees, remember: Using executive authority to address immigration issues is nothing new. Every president since Eisenhower has done it.
Hyperventilating media seem more concerned with describing Mr. Trump’s order as spurring “global confusion,” to borrow an overreaching phrase from Monday’s New York Times.
But the intent is not all that confusing. Here’s what the executive order actually calls for:
• Citizens of Iraq, Iran, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, Libya and Yemen cannot enter the U.S. for 90 days. These countries were named in a 2015 law — enthusiastically passed by Democrats — aimed at scrutinizing people emigrating from nations teeming with jihadist violence.
• Refugees from any country cannot enter the U.S. for 120 days.
• Refugees from Syria cannot enter the U.S. indefinitely.
• No more than 50,000 refugees can be admitted into the U.S. this year.
That’s it. It’s completely legal for the president to do this. Obama knew that, too, when he barred Iraqi refugees from entering the U.S. in 2011. That ban lasted six months. The media outcry over that ban lasted zero months.
But now — because the White House is following the will of the people by trying to make it more difficult for terrorists to enter the United States — liberals are beside themselves.
Leftists are trying to rebut the executive order by invoking the poem at the base at the Statue of Liberty — as if the poem is one our country’s founding documents. They would have you believe that Mr. Trump’s directive somehow revokes a sacred promise of freedom.
These are the same leftists who can’t be troubled with respecting the enduring, immutable strength of our Constitution. Wouldn’t it be refreshing if they embraced our real founding documents with the same passion as the poem?
That poem, The New Colossus, by Emma Lazarus, includes the now-familiar lines “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free …”
It truly is a beautiful sentiment — aimed originally at industrious immigrants of the 1880s. But we have a drastically different brand of immigrant now compared to what we greeted onto our shores then. Was Emma Lazarus really lifting her lamp “beside the golden door” to usher in terrorists who wanted to destroy America?
Since when has a poem been our official immigration policy?
U.S. Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina framed the issue superbly:
“The world we find ourselves in is dangerous and becoming increasingly so. Since national security and public safety are the preeminent functions of government, there is a fundamental duty to ensure the necessary background investigations can be done to stop anyone intent on doing harm from exploiting Americans’ generosity and taking more innocent lives.”
In the wake of the president’s executive order, the main thing to bear in mind is this: America deserves better border security. Our immigration system has been — as the Obama White House reminded us at the beginning of this editorial — “broken for decades.”
And fixing something that has been so broken for so long will be very, very messy, and will take some time. The country has a rough road ahead to take us to a smoother destination.
