I've got a brother-in-law who has used this argument often. We live in Australia, and unless you've been paying attention to the politics of refugees, immigrants and asylum in this country, this won't make much sense.

About 10 years ago, the Liberal Party (conservatives, ironically) put in place a policy (sending boat refugees to off-shore handling places to demotivate people to choose this route) and a directive (the navy to make sure boats never reached Australian shores, often by towing them out of Australian waters). Immigration by boat hence dropped dramatically, but the reason for that dropped was put on the introduction of the policy, treating the policy and the directive as the same category of "policy."

This lumping of various policies and directives into one encompassing category has had the unfortunate effect of showing all Australians that "the policy" was successful in demotivating people to hop into boats, when the reality was very, very different (and we don't know how many boats have sunk and how many people have died from this outside of Australian waters because of this; the Australian navy don't report on what happens outside their areas).