By Douglas Rivlin

At its four-day winter meeting in Hawaii last week, the Republican National Committee adopted a “purity pledge” that candidates must commit to if they are to receive funding from the Party for their 2010 races. A laundry list of conservative priorities heavily pushed by “tea party” activists, the final list was named after the official Republican hero, Ronald Reagan. The problem is, Reagan himself would probably not be considered “pure” by the very Party that worships him.

Putting other issues aside for a moment, item 5 on the GOP purity pledge states “We support legal immigration and assimilation into American society by opposing amnesty for illegal immigrants.”

However, President Reagan, the Golden Boy of the Grand Old Party, was a chief proponent of America’s Golden Door of immigration and opportunity. He supported and signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, a law that, among other things, set approximately 3 million immigrants then in the U.S. illegally on the path to legal status and, for many, eventual citizenship.

Reagan, who supported legal immigration and assimilation every bit as much as (in fact more than) the current cohort of Republicans, saw legalization as a component in restoring the rule of law. He also saw it as a way of officially recognizing the hard work and contributions immigrants were making, and have always made, to the United States. It was the most practical way forward at the time because driving out or deporting millions of immigrants would have created the type of economic and judicial nightmare President Eisenhower had created when he executed a mass deportation policy in the 50s. Reagan rightly saw such an effort as self-destructive.

Irony is not something Republicans do well, especially intentionally. But you gotta hand it to them for constructing a purity test for candidates, naming it for Ronald Reagan, and then including items the Big He, Himself would find anathema to American values.

After heated negotiations at the Hawaii retreat, the Republicans gave themselves an out that will allow many of their candidates – and perhaps even the Gipper himself – to test “pure.” In order to receive funding from the Party for your campaign, you must adopt only 8 of the 10 items on the list, so “purity” is a relative term. For example, you can still be against the Defense of Marriage Act, oppose the National Rifle Association’s agenda or support the President’s energy proposal and be “pure,” but not all three at the same time. [By the way, this flexible GOP definition of “purity” probably explains the ineffectiveness of “abstinence-only” instruction as a way to control teen pregnancy.]

And the word “amnesty” is a malleable term. What President George W. Bush called “earned legalization,” restrictionists like Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama calls “amnesty.” Perhaps they will let some GOP candidates argue, as most Democrats (and Americans) do, that a process by which you pay fines, submit to criminal background checks, pay fees, and are then required to pay taxes for the rest of your life is not exactly “amnesty.”

But somehow, I think the “tea partiers” and GOP activists who cooked this up – who reject nuance as a matter of principle and personal pride – are defining “no amnesty” in the strictest sense of the word. To them, a “no amnesty” pledge means that no person who is currently in the U.S. without proper legal status could ever obtain legal immigration status, no matter what conditions they were required to meet. Our laws already prevent, for the most part, people leaving the country and coming back with a visa legally or obtaining legal status once they are here.

Every single one of the estimated 12,000,000 immigrants here illegally would therefore have to leave the country or be deported, with or without their 4,000,000 U.S. citizen children. That’s roughly equivalent to kicking out the population of Pennsylvania or Ohio.

It is not going to happen. Even people who want it to happen don’t think it’s gonna happen.

Mass deportation is a fantasy as long as there are TV cameras, You Tube, and individual, compelling, and heartbreaking stories of the human beings we would be sending on their not-so-merry way.

The restrictionists’ Plan B is equally unlikely. Over time, a policy of massive enforcement will demoralize immigrants who will then proceed to deport themselves by leaving. While some – perhaps tens of thousands – are already leaving and fewer are certainly coming, we are not seeing a reduction in the size of the population of immigrants here illegally to make a serious dent in the 12,000,000. With sustained double-digit unemployment and waves of home foreclosures, if a mass stampede hasn’t started, it isn’t likely to.

Contrary to Republican conventional wisdom – and perhaps even their desires – the economy will eventually get better and the forces keeping illegal immigration low and making some immigrants consider the greener pastures of rural Guatemala or wherever they are from will be reduced. Even a Republican Party hopped up on tea would not propose a sustained period of economic despair simply to drive out foreigners.

The most likely outcome of the “pure” Republican commitment to the “no amnesty” fiction is what we have now: a vast underground of immigrants here illegally and indefinitely, with limited rights and few inroads to assimilation. Smuggling and violence will continue at our borders because we have not channeled enough immigration through a visa process and controlled ports of entry. People will continue to overstay temporary visas because permanent visas are unavailable. Immigrants who have already been here for years, have car notes, mortgages, careers, and children who know no other country will hunker down and muddle through, but that’s neither good for the immigrants nor everyone else. The no compromise, “no amnesty,” law and order approach yields a lot less law and a lot less order…forever.

Where Ronald Reagan saw America as a “shining city of a hill,” many of today’s GOP activists see a gated community where the help is invited in to clean up, cook, wash, but nothing else. Please care for grandma and the kids, but do not mistake our employment for a welcome or legal standing. Do not expect basic wage and hour laws; even if doing so would help other workers who were born here compete fairly for opportunity.

These Republicans hope that this generation of immigrants, unlike every generation of immigrants before them, never becomes citizens and voters. And if they do become citizens and voters, Republicans better hope they – and their U.S. citizen family members – don’t remember which Party required their candidates to pledge to block it.

This is the fourth article in a new daily series on News Junkie Post known as the Progressive Unity Project. Each day, there will be a new article published from the perspective of the environment, labor, LGBT, immigration, science, legalization, or secularity. About the weekly contributor on Immigration Thursday:

Immigration Thursday

For nearly nine years, Douglas Rivlin served as the Senior Director of Communications of the National Immigration Forum, one of the nation’s preeminent pro-immigrant advocacy organizations and one of the leading groups in the national Reform Immigration FOR America campaign.  At the Forum until October 2009, Rivlin was responsible for helping reporters and the public understand the immigration issue and what is at stake in the comprehensive immigration reform debate. Prior to joining the Forum, Rivlin served as a Senior Advisor to the Director of the Voice of America and was the Washington Director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. He began his career in advocacy and communications at the Children’s Defense Fund and the Advocacy Institute. Douglas earned an MA in communication at the Annenberg School for Communication of the University of Pennsylvania and a BA in economics from the University of California at Santa Cruz. Douglas online:  Twitter Digg

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