Backdoor Amnesty for Illegal Aliens Is (Still) Political Cyanide
Republicans should have learned this lesson over ten years ago. Yet they’re preparing to die on the amnesty hill yet again.
William Sullivan | April 12, 2026 www.americanthinker.com
Do you remember Eric Cantor?
I reckon that few Americans today do. But he was kind of a big deal a little over a decade ago.
First elected to Virginia’s 7th district in 2001, Cantor served as the House minority whip from 2009 to 2011, during which time he was instrumental in orchestrating Republican opposition to the 2009 Obama stimulus and 2010 passage of Obamacare, against which Republicans stood resolute as fiscal hawks, and without a single Republican voting for the latter abomination. Then, when Republicans had won the House in November of 2010, he served behind Speaker John Boehner as the House majority leader.
Republican voters would later prove that they would tolerate many hypocrisies from the GOP politicians whom they had given the legislative mandate. Under Boehner, for example, the spending packages only got bigger than they were in the Obama years, somehow, prompting many conservatives to wonder if Republicans were interested in the reduction of spending at all.
Though it seems that American voters of all stripes, for some reason, have become okay with reckless fiscal spending that has us careening toward a suicidal debt cliff at breakneck speed, there is one thing that has long been understood as excommunicable for Republican politicians, and that is the rewarding of illegal aliens with amnesty.
Eric Cantor may have been an effective and promising politician, but he became the canary in the coal mine when it comes to the absolute toxicity of the amnesty issue with Republican voters and, arguably, voters in general.
You see, Eric Cantor presented the shell game that politicians routinely play with the electorate. He publicly opposed the form of amnesty that was presented by the Democrat-led DREAM (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) Act of 2010, which was already an old backdoor amnesty ploy that Democrats had been pushing since 2001. It failed in 2010, and, given that Republicans swept the House by winning over 60 seats in that year, that was the closest it would ever come to being a law.
But in 2013, Cantor “softened” his stance on the core ideas of the DREAM Act and began suggesting that it was a good starting point for immigration reform. “It’s time to provide an opportunity for legal residence and citizenship for those who were brought to this country as children,” he declared.
Cantor was counting on a very specific ignorance among the American people. The idea was that he obviously knew that American citizens, and particularly the Republican constituency, had no tolerance for immediate amnesty. Instead, he argued for granting illegal aliens a legal status, free from any prospect of deportation. This would, the argument went, open the door for future citizenship at some point further down the road. The political term for this backdoor amnesty process became known as a “path to citizenship” for illegal aliens.
But Republican voters sniffed him out in historic fashion. To their credit, voters in Virginia absolutely wrecked Eric Cantor’s future as a congressman, an event that should have prevented any Republican from ever trying to do it fifty years hence, much less twelve.
It was, inarguably, among the most surprising and historic upsets in recent political memory.
Eric Cantor is the first and only House majority leader to lose a primary since that position was created in 1899. Internal polls showed him over 20 points ahead of his Tea Party opposition candidate, Dave Brat, in the weeks leading to the election. But Eric Cantor lost by over 11 points in a primary after relentless attacks by his opponent about his softness on the issue of amnesty.
That’s a thirty-point swing, which is insane. To this day, I can’t think of anything like it. And it was obvious to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention that it was because of Cantor’s reversal on amnesty.
I commented on this at the time, as prominent talking heads like Brit Hume and Karl Rove were suggesting that Republican voters, in their resistance to supporting backdoor amnesty efforts, were mucking up Republican presidential chances in 2016. Anyone who hoped to win in 2016, they argued, would simply have to have a plan for some “path to citizenship” for illegal aliens to win the election.
Then came Trump.
The backdoor amnesty issue may have destroyed the promising political career of Eric Cantor in historic fashion. And absolute opposition to amnesty, backdoor or otherwise, was arguably the leading driver of President Donald J. Trump’s victory in the 2016 election.
It appears that many Republicans today, like Mike Lawyer of New York and Maria Elvira Salazar of Florida, who are actively spearheading this newest bipartisan backdoor amnesty bill, have not learned this important lesson that voters taught Republicans twelve years ago.
Both are openly suggesting that illegal aliens of a certain age should be shielded from deportation until such time that they can be granted full amnesty down the road. It’s the same backdoor amnesty plan as 2014, only with a new and more insulting name. The “Dignidad” (Spanish for dignity) Act is purposefully being marketed in a foreign language, make no mistake, because it serves as a thumb in the eye to the 3 in 4 Americans who believe that English should be the national language of our country.
Lawyer was recently embarrassed in a Fox News interview with Laura Ingraham, and Salazar cannot answer the most basic questions about how the federal government can even begin to go about vetting 17 million illegal aliens, as required by the law she is spearheading.
The Dignidad Act is doomed to fail, and we can reasonably expect some Republican careers to die on this amnesty hill. And if you harbor any disbelief about that, perhaps you can direct your questions to Eric Cantor, who found a career in investment banking after his historic electoral defeat back in 2014.
