Lindsey Graham’s Sordid Immigration Legacy
No Republican was more eager to push amnesty than the late senator
Lindsey Graham died suddenly over the weekend. Naturally, everyone had their own take on the South Carolina senator’s legacy.
Liberals attacked him for being a pawn of Donald Trump. Trump honored his friend in typical Trump fashion, announcing the senator’s departure as if his favorite team had just lost a close game. Many conservatives memorialized him as a staunch fighter for their cause. Others denounced him as an odious war hawk.
Everyone acknowledged Graham’s undying obsession with more foreign interventionism. But a number of right-wingers contended he was actually good on domestic issues. They pointed to his fervent support for One Big Beautiful Bill and the SAVE America Act, as well as his steadfast defense of Brett Kavanaugh during his contentious confirmation.
But these actions don’t obscure his chief domestic priority of achieving amnesty.
Over the last 20 years, Graham led congressional efforts to pass this terrible policy. He fortunately failed in his efforts. His enthusiasm only dampened over the last few years. Any retrospective of the man must account for his role in trying to make America’s immigration problem much worse.
While Graham was not in Congress to help usher in the infamous amnesty of 1986, he was around for every attempt to repeat the mistake. In the amnesty push of George W. Bush’s second term, Graham made himself one of the leading GOP voices urging the party to take up the idea. He backed John McCain’s “bipartisan” measure to reward illegal aliens and called opponents of amnesty “bigots”:
Our immigration system is broken and we need to find a way to get people right with the law. Once we try to find that way, we also need to understand that if the law means anything, you have to have a just result…We all let this get out of control and we all need to fix it. We are going to solve this problem. We’re not going to run people down. We’re not going to scapegoat people. We’re going to tell the bigots to shut up and we’re going to get this right.
His cheerleading for amnesty earned Graham the ire of the base, and the sobriquet “Grahamnesty” from Rush Limbaugh. But that didn’t discourage the South Carolinian from his quest. As soon as Barack Obama got into office, Graham looked for ways to do “bipartisan reform” once more. It took until Obama’s reelection victory for this effort to gain steam. In 2013, Graham became one of four Republican Senators to join “Gang of Eight” that drew up a new amnesty bill. He told Republicans that their political future depended on amnesty:
We’re in a demographic death spiral as a party and the only way we can get back in good graces with the Hispanic community, in my view, is to pass comprehensive immigration reform. If you don’t do that, it really doesn’t matter who we run, (in 2016) in my view.
Trump would prove him wrong. It’s forgotten now, but Graham ran for president that year. His bid went nowhere, but he did demonstrate his zealous commitment to mass immigration. He vowed that any immigration bill that came to his desk must offer citizenship to illegals. He denounced Trump’s plans for mass deportations. He proudly embraced the “Grahamnesty” and “Lindsey Gomez” labels from the base. Trump’s proposed Muslim ban made the war hawk apologize to the Muslim world and say it was one of the worst things a politician could do. He made sure to call Trump an “un-American” bigot over his immigration views.
While he later personally warmed up to Trump the man, he did not accept the president’s immigration agenda. He pleaded with Trump to keep Obama’s amnesty for “Dreamers” (illegal aliens who came to the U.S. as minors) in place. He opposed calls by Trump and other Republicans to cut legal immigration, saying it would hurt the economy. In 2018, he once again served as a lead negotiator of a Senate amnesty plan. This effort was less grand than the Gang of Eight; it simply aimed to legalize Dreamers. Conservatives and the White House wanted a limited legalization framework that would provide $25 billion for a border wall and a number of immigration restrictions. Graham advocated for a full pathway to citizenship for nearly two million illegals while providing the wall funding–nothing else. No deal would pass Congress.
But Graham didn’t give up on the dream. Right after the 2020 election, he promised to work with Democrats to pass “immigration reform.” In early 2021, he drew up another Dreamer amnesty with Democrat Dick Durbin. But as the Biden administration’s disastrous open borders policy bore fruit, Graham backed away from amnesty. He realized it was bad politics as millions poured into the country. He chose to rail against illegal immigration instead.
He stuck to this posture under Trump. He disavowed the idea of a new DREAM Act late last year, saying we need to first “deal with the millions of people here illegally.” His apparent change signaled how much the Right has transformed over the last decade, the full story of which is told in my new book, Whitepill. Even Grahamnesty now wants to sound like an immigration hawk.
Graham was a skilled politician. He knew his position had lost badly within the Republican Party. Now Republicans demonstrate their conservative bona fides by calling for restrictions on legal immigration. No one wants to openly avow amnesty anymore.
But it’s not clear whether he would’ve stuck to it. It’s likely he would’ve reverted to form under a Democratic president, especially with the virtual end of new illegal immigration under Trump.
There was one area that Graham was surprisingly good on. He was a staunch critic of birthright citizenship, making his stance known long before Trump came down the escalator. He was calling for ending the practice as early as 2010. He argued in 2015:
I think it’s a bad practice to give citizenship based on birth. We have evidence of people buying tourist visas for the express purpose of coming over here and having a child as birth tourism. I don’t think that’s a good idea.
It should be noted he made these comments in an interview trashing Trump’s immigration proposals.
He was one of the few Republicans who publicly backed Trump’s suggestion of scrapping birthright citizenship in his first term. At the beginning of Trump’s second term, he introduced a bill to end granting citizenship to the children born of illegal immigrants and non-immigrants. After the Supreme Court affirmed birthright citizenship last month, Graham declared he’s “determined more than ever to put an end to this major magnet for illegal immigration and birth tourism.”
Prior to Trump, there weren’t many Republicans eager to challenge birthright citizenship. Graham deserves some credit for taking this stance much earlier than his colleagues.
He also deserves credit for standing by Brett Kavanaugh against false rape allegations. Much of conservative media wanted to abandon the justice to the wolves. But the South Carolinian didn’t, and Kavanaugh’s confirmation was a significant cultural win for the Right. If it weren’t for Graham, Republicans may have caved and made themselves helpless in the face of future dubious accusations.
There are worse Republicans than Graham. He never took the Jeff Flake route of sanctimoniously assailing the Trump GOP and undermining the Right’s agenda to get airtime on CNN. He was a loyal soldier to the party, which made him a valuable asset to Trump. But that virtue gave him influence to push an agenda antithetical to America First.
Graham’s good deeds do not erase his years of amnesty advocacy. Along with his hawkery, immigration will stand as one of his defining issues–and he was on the wrong side of it.
That’s something we shouldn’t forget.
You can now preorder Scott Greer’s new book, “Whitepill: The Online Right and the Making of Trump’s America,” from this link.