One of our favorite moments in the political debate in the past two generations came between the election day on which Ronald Reagan emerged as the the 40^th American president-elect and the time he was sworn in. It was in that interregnum that his older brother, Neil, in an interview with Los Angeles Times, disclosed that their grandfather had snuck into America from Canada, where he’d arrived after fleeing famine at Ireland. He was, Neil Reagan said, “probably one of the early wetbacks.”

We’ve been thinking about that moment as America marks today the 125^th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty. There is a gala being hosted by the National Park Service. Our friends at the Brooklyn Eagle are quoting the president of the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation Inc., Stephen A. Briganti, as calling the Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi work the “most famous symbol in the world.” Emma Lazarus’s sonnet, “The New Collosus,” which articulated the welcome to immigration, is being celebrated by Nextbook-Press with an online annotation of the great poem, and Web cams are scheduled to begin operating in the torch of the statue so that all the world can see the vista of Liberty.

Yet America is mired in a struggle over immigration that threatens to dim the welcome to which the Statue of Liberty and Emma Lazarus’s poem give such expression. The United States Congress has defaulted on its constitutional mandate to establish a “uniform* rule of naturalization,” and the presidents have failed to execute what laws are on the books. The result is that the states, most famously Arizona and Alabama, are stepping in with a patchwork of non-uniform,* and contra-constitutional, measures designed to deal with undocumented aliens who have reached our shores.

In the midst of this crisis not a single candidate in either party is articulating a message in respect of immigration consonant with the sentiments being celebrated today. On the Democratic side, the pundits and politicians are quick to set down as racist opponents those fighting to restrict illegal immigration and expel those already here. Yet the Democrats advance the very statist, anti-growth policies that make hostility all too inevitable. It is the Democrats who stand for the idea that the pie cannot be expanded but has to be cut into ever smaller pieces.

The Republicans are in the midst of their own default. Those jockeying to the fore of the party that stands for pro-growth, free market policies have fallen to bickering over who would take the hardest line against the strivers who are trying, for their own good reasons, to pitch in on our economic growth. No Republican is offering a full-throated defense of the sentiments enshrined at the Statue of Liberty. Reagan himself occasionally talked about the importance of enforcing the immigrations laws on the southern border. But mainly he talked about tax reform, sound money, reducing the size of government, and setting the stage for the economic growth that his policies did in fact produce. It was a formula in which the bitterness over immigration fell aside.

Just before Reagan was sworn in, your editor warned, in a jocular column in the Wall Street Journal, that if, after learning that Reagan’s grandfather was an illegal immigrant, America went ahead an swore Reagan in as president, it would send a “beacon of hope” to “all the millions of refugees hoping, plotting or conniving to find a way into America.” It would “signal that no matter how many of America’s immigration laws you broke to get into America, no matter how tough your lot once you got there, if you manage to find someone to marry and the two of you manage to have children, you might just be begetting the parent of President and if you do, the country will probably look the other way.” And so, during the Reagan era at least, it did.

________

*The point about uniformity is that it is the basis of immigrants, no matter in which state they arrive or settle, becoming Americans.