Immigration: What’s in an Adjective?

David L. Leal has revealed to California’s GOP the secret of “winning the Latino vote” (April 19): “Over time, as Latinos and immigrants . . . assimilate in the classic American manner, they will be increasingly open to the Reagan message, as many already are.” But when he speaks of immigrants, he omits the vital adjective “legal.” The assimilation he takes for granted, he thinks can come after entry — legal or illegal. He is wrong. Congress has long insisted that there must be assimilation, guaranteed by naturalization, as the prerequisite to legal immigrants’ receiving the rights and duties of citizenship. That doesn’t happen when you allow illegals to cut to the head of the line. The open-borders Democrats don’t care.

Proposition 187 prohibited the State of California from covering for illegal immigrants the skyrocketing costs of health care, K–12 public schooling, and imprisonment (as opposed to deportation). In plain English, it prohibited sticking state taxpayers with the cost of federal mandates. California sued the Clinton administration to stop that, as did the Democratic governors of Texas (Ann Richards), Florida (Lawton Childs), and New York (Mario Cuomo). When lawsuits failed to get the attention of Congress, California voters justifiably lost patience. Prop 187 was the result.

America annually admits and offers naturalization to more legal immigrants than any other country in the world.

Neither California nor America can begin to absorb, much less assimilate, all the world’s poor, uneducated masses, who lack the skills we need. It’s realism, not nativism, to say that. Calling 187 racist was and is a false and ugly smear. Today the mainstream media ignore President Biden’s incitement of thousands of women and children to swarm our Mexican border, at inexcusable risk to both themselves and Americans on the other side.

Pete Wilson Governor of California, 1991–99

David L. Leal responds: Pete Wilson has a lot to say about a topic that was not part of my article, but I stand with Ronald Reagan on the issue of migration legality and illegality, and so should principled conservatives and the California GOP.

Nobody can claim the Gipper was soft on law and order, but his vision of America had little patience with artificial barriers and restrictions. To quote further from the 1952 speech I cited in my article, Reagan thought the “means of selection was very simple” for new Americans: “any place in the world and any person from those places.” As Lou Cannon wrote in Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power, “the idea that Americans were made, not born, was the basis of Reagan’s steadfast belief in American exceptionalism, a view that changed hardly at all as he marched across the political spectrum.”

Cannon also notes that Reagan in his 1980 presidential campaign advocated a “North American accord” that would have allowed the free movement of Americans, Canadians, and Mexicans across our borders.

As governor of California, Reagan knew the immigration issue better than most elected officials. As president, he signed into law the large IRCA amnesty and never regretted it. Rather than vilifying “illegals” — hard-working people of faith and family values who overwhelmingly want to achieve the American dream and live safely — today’s principled conservatives should focus on reforming our immigration laws in ways that promote prosperity, opportunity, and freedom.

Correction

Because of an editing error, “Still the Wild West” (Erica Sandberg, April 19) asserted that Leanna Louie had founded the United Peace Collaborative after the rioting that followed the killing of George Floyd. In fact, she founded it before Floyd’s death.