You are an employer. One of your employees has spent years neglecting the most basic duty of his position.  When you call him on it for the umpteenth time, he reassures you that he will get it right this time. But to do so, he must assume other duties in addition to his original one.

As this person’s employer, would you accept his word?

You are the spouse of a chronic philanderer.  After years of enduring one betrayal after the other, you’ve finally had enough.  He begs you not to leave and promises once more that he will stop his tireless cheating. Only this time, he tells you that for this to happen, he will also put an end to all of his other irritating habits: leaving his socks lying around, leaving his whiskers in the sink, leaving the toiletseat up, etc.

As this person’s spouse, would you accept his word?

These questions are rhetorical: no employer and no spouse with an ounce of sense could fail to see these promises for the worthless gestures that they are.

A person who repeatedly failed to do the job for which he was hired is much more likely than not to find himself without a job.  But even if, for some reason—like tenure, say, or his membership in a union—he isn’t fired, only the most wildly irrational of employers would think that if only this employee has more duties delegated to him will he then shape up.

And while a spouse may stay with her cheating spouse even as he continues to cheat, there is no one so foolish to think that if only he devotes himself to discharging more of the obligations that he has heretofore violated will he then discharge this one obligation.

“Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”  In our private relationships, there are fewer statements that more resonate with us than this.  When it comes to our relationship with our government, however, it is as if its meaning was utterly alien to us.

When those in the federal government advocate, as they now do once more, on behalf of amnesty, they are like the derelict employee and the philanderer from these examples.

Our government is useless if it doesn’t secure our nation’s borders.  This task is one of the few responsibilities that the United States Constitution assigns to it, a duty that it has failed miserably to execute.  So, because the government hasn’t done its job, because it hasn’t honored its promise to protect its citizens, we now have what our government assures us is an untenable situation, a crisis that demands immediate attention:

At a minimum, 11 million illegal aliens are living in our midst.

What should be done? Our office holders from both parties, from Barack Obama to Marco Rubio, tell us that these millions of people who entered America illegally and, thus, broke a number of other laws since their arrival, must now be placed on a “pathway to citizenship.” 

They must be granted amnesty.  They must be permitted to stay here.

Read: our elected representatives failed to avail themselves of the endless opportunities that they’ve had to keep their promise and now the rest of us are told that we have to deal with the consequences of their abdication of duty—irrespective of the costs.

Yet there is more.

Not only do we have to suffer the effects of our representatives’ refusal to do the one thing that they pledged to do.  We are now told that the only remedy available for reducing this damage is one that they have already tried before, back in 1986,  a “solution” that actually—and predictably—added to the damage.

But this isn’t the worst of it.

As it turns out, things aren’t looking all that bleak after all, to hear our amnesty apologists in Washington D.C. tell it.  Never again will Americans have to worry about this illegal immigration thing.  Never again will they have to worry about the government doing its job and securing the borders. What will make the future different from the past is that in the future, the government won’t have to worry about fulfilling just this job. It will now have this job and a whole lot of other jobs to do. 

That’s right.

The same federal government that couldn’t just secure America’s borders before is now promising us that it will be able to do this much and everything else that is contained in this latest rendition of “comprehensive immigration reform.” 

Anyone who buys this is a sucker.

Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me.

And shame on the federal government that never seems to tire of trying to fool the American citizen—particularly when it comes to the issue of amnesty.