Mike Morrell is a businessman from Southern California.  He has been married to Joanie for 31 years and together they have three children.  He is an alternate on the San Bernardino County Republican Central Committee.  He is a candidate for the 63rd Assembly District.  His website can be found at:   www.morrellforassembly.com

We hear today that the United States houses between fifteen and twenty-five million illegal immigrants.  An estimated 32 percent of these individuals live in California, as our state offers assistance up to $11.2 billion annually.  In light of the staggering fiscal and social problems inherent in these figures, what position should we Republicans take?

Certainly, we recall that ours is a nation of immigrants.  From the Eastern seaboard Lady Liberty calls, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”  Truly, America is unlike any other nation, with neither racial nor ancestral borders to define us.  Yet our founders determined a set of immovable principles, both political and moral, and these became the “ties that bind.”  These principles found clear expression in our early writings.

The Declaration of Independence describes a process of ideological (rather than genealogical) nation-making.  For Americans, the first principle was “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”  The second principle was government by consent, which exists to ensure the safe exercise of these rights.   To the modern world, the American experiment of equality and consent presented a novel method for making citizens.

The Founders believed that a people’s’ ability to become citizens would not depend upon their race, gender, or national origin, but rather upon their belief in human equality and their commitment to principles of American government.   Do not come, they thought, if you deny the God-given rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  That word “happiness” signified the good life, or living virtuously.  A man could not understand happiness after living too long under despotism, or becoming accustomed to vices of fraud, deceit or crime.      Content under tyranny externally, or dominated by the “tyranny of the passions” internally, some strangers lacked the humane self-assertion and noble self-restraint needed to maintain liberty and government by consent.  Our founding generation could not overlook the absence of such virtues—are you and I willing to risk falling short?

Today, we speak highly of “respect” to promote a free and decent society.  The founders envisioned the same goals, but reserved their respect for those who exhibited honesty, truth, gratitude, industriousness, assertion and love of fellow men and women.  This attitude built on the centuries-old ideas of Plato’s Statesman, which asserted that the proper virtues must be woven into the souls of all citizens if they hoped to achieve a free and just society.  Similarly, with vastly different backgrounds, but fortified with common virtues and shared purpose, people from a multitude of countries could be bound together as citizens in every era of our history.  As Lincoln, in studying this condition of strangers on our shores, noted:

If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence, they find that those old men say that “ We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh, of the men who wrote that Declaration—and so they are.  That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.

To this sentiment should we return as we continue the debate over immigration.

Americans on both sides of the aisle believe in equality.  Today, then, how do we answer those on the Left who argue for open border policies?  First, we must examine the motives of those who push for a “quick” pathway to citizenship.  Recent polling and statistics from American Spectator and other publications suggest that the majority of children (born to American citizens between 1981 and 2000) grew up with conservative homes and religious backgrounds.  Over the next decade, this will represent a Republican voter base five million stronger than that of the Democrats.  Are we surprised when our opponents champion the right to vote for those here illegally?   After years of legislation for Planned Parenthood and similar agendas, the liberals have finally run up against what are to them disconcerting demographic trends.

Second, as Americans, we cannot afford to stoop to these political games as the integrity of our national character hangs in the balance.  Instead, let our first objective be to restore our commitment to the political principles of the American Founding, and to return to the notion that a loyalty to those principles is an essential part of making new citizens.  Only then can we uphold uniform rules of naturalization, and secure our nation for ourselves and for future generations.