Thread: The Selling Of The President's Amnesty

The Selling of the President's Amnesty

A proponent of “earned legalization,” i.e. amnesty, explained to an audience at American University in Washington, DC on April 24 the origin of the conditions for amnesty in President Bush’s efforts to convince Congress to adopt his immigration agenda. In a panel discussion – in which FAIR was a participant – Tamar Jacoby, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and columnist on immigration, explained her participation in a series of focus group sessions designed to probe public attitudes towards letting illegal aliens benefit from immigration legislation.

She related how most participants were hostile to the idea until after a prolonged period of suggesting the impracticality of mass deportations and dividing families. Eventually, she said, the participants reluctantly agreed to discuss what provisions would have to accompany a measure to allow the illegal aliens to stay. Over a series of focus group sessions, Jacoby said the terms for the 'earned legalization' were refined to the point that participants began to agree more rapidly that they could accept those terms.


Those terms, such as learning English, paying taxes and a penalty, and having a job have now become standard fare in public opinion polling. They are now eliciting a majority response in public opinion polls that they constitute a more reasonable alternative to mass deportations – which no one has proposed in Congress. Those terms have also been incorporated in the White House talking points and in the Gutierrez-Flake immigration bill (H.R.1645) introduced in the House of Representatives.

-- Jack Martin





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