SAN DIEGO — This month, former president Bill Clinton celebrated his 80th birthday.

I have the perfect gift. It's a reckoning.

Clinton is the ultimate political escape artist. In fact, there's an old joke that became popular in the late 1990's when he lied about having sex in the Oval Office with a 22-year-old White House intern, before eventually having to come clean.

It goes like this: President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore are riding in a convertible with the top down. It rains. Gore gets wet.

When examining the Clinton legacy, one thing that tends to get overlooked is the fact that the Man from Hope is the undisputed father of the modern immigration restrictionist movement.

Much of the demagoguery that is currently on display in the immigration debate, as well as the cruelty that we see from federal immigration agents, have their roots in the Clinton years.

Earlier this month, a poll by PBS News/National Public Radio/Marist found that 60% of Americans disapprove of the excesses of immigration and Customs Enforcement. And a majority say that ICE has gone too far in its methods and actually makes Americans less safe.

For this, most Americans blame President Donald Trump. He's an easy target. After all, he is the one who called for mass deportations. He allowed ICE agents to violate people's rights, engage in profiling and disregard due process as they strive to meet a daily quota of 3,000 arrests.

But there is blame to go around for the three Democratic presidents who laid the groundwork for the current debauchery. Joe Biden tried to limit the right of refugees to seek asylum. Barack Obama deported 3.2 million undocumented immigrants.

And, it was Clinton who started this circus back in the 1990's because he was worried about Democrats being outflanked by Republicans as soft on immigration enforcement, just as they had been portrayed as soft on crime in the 1980s. In both cases, they overcompensated by dropping the hammer.

In 1994, the Clinton administration launched an effort to militarize the U.S.-Mexico border south of San Diego with Operation Gatekeeper, which installed more fencing and deployed additional border patrol agents. A year earlier, the administration had launched Operation Hold-The-Line near El Paso, Texas. In 1995 came Operation Safeguard, near Nogales, Ariz. All three initiatives pushed thousands of immigrants into the desert where many of them died.

In 1995, in his State of the Union address, Clinton went full Trump. "All Americans are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country," he said. "The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants. The public service they use impose burdens on our taxpayers."

In 1996, Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, which made it easier to deport people and nearly impossible for them to return legally once deported because it imposed a ten-year ban on re-entry.

Unlike Trump, Clinton never seemed to be motivated by an explicit hatred for immigrants. For the Democrat, it wasn't personal. It was just politics. By the time he got to the White House, Clinton and the immigration issue already had a messy history.

In 1980, President Jimmy Carter ordered that as many as 20,000 Cuban refugees be housed at Fort Chaffee in Arkansas. That summer, some of the refugees rioted and a fire broke out. Local residents were terrified, and many armed themselves to the teeth. The whole situation was a powder keg. Sixty-two people were injured in the uprising, and even after the riot was quashed, there was still a price to be paid by those who let the situation get so far out of hand. The young Democratic governor of Arkansas — who until then was thought to have a bright future — was tossed out of office by voters.

But, in 1982, the Comeback Kid ran for governor again and took back the seat. Ten years later, he would run successfully for president and take with him to Washington the major lesson of the Fort Chaffee riot: Never take lightly the power of the immigration issue — or its first cousin, the refugee phenomenon — to upset the apple cart. It's better to be seen as too tough than too weak.

When it comes to immigration, that's the Clinton curse. And Americans have been laboring under it ever since.

Happy Birthday, Mr. President. And thanks for nothing.

To find out more about Ruben Navarrette and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Photo credit: Smithsonian at Unsplash