Making Sense by Michael Reagan

We’ve got Israel looking for billions.

We’ve got Ukraine begging for more billions.

And the president and Democrats can’t wait another day to cut fat checks for both countries.

Thank God the Republicans in charge of the House of Representatives are telling Democrats that before we dish out money to help Ukraine and Israel defend their borders, we have to defend ours first.

Naturally, Democrats don’t want anything to do with that sensible deal.

They’re calling it outrageous. They’re saying Republicans are bad guys who don’t care about dead Israelis or who support Russia and not Ukraine.

But wait a minute.

Thanks to the Democrats, our Southern border isn’t even a border anymore. It’s become the wide-open front door of America that 10,000 people from a hundred countries want to pass through – every day.

About 8,500 are being allowed in – checked in, really, to Hotel America – every day. Then they are quickly scattered around to cities like Chicago and New York, where they’re causing social and economic problems that have become so costly even the biased national media can no longer ignore them.

Republicans in the House cannot allow the Democrats and President Biden to get the money they want for Ukraine and Israel now with the promise that they’ll close the Southern border later.

Republicans – and the country – got suckered down that crooked Democrat road in 1986 with the Immigration Reform and Control Act.

Known as the Simpson–Mazzoli Act, it granted amnesty to millions of immigrants who came to the U.S. illegally and gave them a path to citizenship.

My father agreed to sign that act into law in exchange for a promise made by the Democrats running Congress that they would close the border.

Thirty seven years and at least 12 million illegal immigrants later, we’re still waiting for the Democrats to keep their promise.

This president has irresponsibly opened the border wide and invited in all the citizens of the world.

So many people are pouring in that they can’t be properly vetted. We don’t know if they’re criminals, plus thousands of single young men are coming from countries that hate us like Iran and China.

God knows how many terrorists have sneaked in – which explains why FBI director Christopher Wray is saying the threat of terrorism today is at the “blinking-red” level.

It’s no wonder every morning when I wake up it feels like Sept. 10, 2001. I cross my fingers and pray we won’t suffer another major attack by terrorists.

I believe most of the immigrants coming here today from Mexico, Central America and God-knows-where else are good and decent people who’ll make fine Americans – even most of the got-aways.

It’s true that to get here they broke or took advantage of our poorly written or badly enforced immigration laws. But they came for the same good reasons our forefathers did – to improve their economic lives and enjoy our freedoms.

We don’t hear enough about the successful immigrants who came here illegally decades ago, but I run into them all the time.

For example, the guy who put in new counter tops for our house in 2006 was sneaked across the border as a child in the trunk of a Ford Grenada because his parents didn’t want him to grow up in Mexico.

He grew up, was given amnesty by the Simpson-Mazzoli Act and became a premier stone worker – and a good American.

You can’t blame today’s tsunami of illegal immigrants for taking advantage of our broken immigration policy, which has been a bipartisan failure for decades and has been deliberately blown up by Biden’s insane open-door policies.

Republicans are now in a position to end our immigration nightmare. But they have to be tough with the Democrats. It’s been 37 years since Simpson-Mazzoli. It’s time to shut the damn door.

–

Copyright 2023 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.