Axios CEO Jim VandeHei unwittingly summed up the liberal position during an appearance on MSNBC. “I think the [Democrat] party’s changed on immigration. I think the feeling that they have to appear to be really strong by supporting a lot more border security, that that has waned, and that the enthusiasm of the Democratic [P]arty is for protecting immigrants.”48 What he means is protecting illegal immigrants—and this is difficult to refute when you consider such head-scratchers as New York Democrats passing legislation to fund college for illegal immigrants. At an estimated cost of $27 million, the Dream Act would make thousands of “Dreamers” eligible for financial aid to attend public colleges in New York. The bill is “a slap in the face for all the hardworking taxpayers who play [by] the rules and struggle for the costs of a college education,” said Republican state senator Daphne Jordan. Other Republican legislators agreed the bill would transfer money to illegals from legal residents who often have difficulty paying their own or their children’s tuition. In addition, New York Democrats say they will consider permitting illegal immigrants to acquire driver’s licenses and giving them improved housing. Governor Cuomo said he might favor compelling insurers to provide free contraceptive care for illegals.49
In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that the city will spend up to $100 million per year to provide healthcare for people without health insurance, including illegal immigrants, at city-owned facilities. Republican state assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis raised the obvious objection: “Our citizens have a hard enough time covering their own healthcare costs and now Mayor de Blasio also wants them to pay for the healthcare of 300,000 citizens of other countries. The mayor must stop abusing the middle class and treating us like his personal ATM.”50
In California, Democratic State Assembly member Dr. Joaquin Arambula intends to reintroduce a bill to provide Medicaid coverage to illegal immigrants over the age of nineteen. If he prevails, the full benefits of the California Medical Assistance Program (Medi-Cal)—hospitalization, prescription drugs, oral care, and vision care—would be available for all low-income earners, including illegals. The state projected that 1.2 million illegals would qualify for the program, costing $3 billion a year. California governor Gavin Newsom supports the measure.51
On the federal level, congressional Democrats showed their aversion to border security by demanding, as a condition to reopening the government during the shutdown, a 17 percent reduction in ICE detention beds sought by the administration, an action which Republicans argued would result in more criminals on the streets.52 “This is a poison pill that no administration, not this one, not the previous one, should ever accept,” said Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell. “Imagine the absurdity of this: House Democrats want to set a limit on how many criminal aliens our government can detain.”53 Dozens of U.S. sheriffs came to Capitol Hill to protest the ICE bed cap. “We are at wits end on this,” said Bristol County, Massachusetts, sheriff Thomas M. Hodgson. “This really is a catastrophe.”
Two national sheriff’s groups, the National Sheriffs’ Association and the Major County Sheriffs of America, maintained that some 8,300 criminal aliens would have to be immediately released if the cap went into effect. They said 90 percent of illegal immigrants in ICE’s custody in the nation’s interior (as opposed to at its border facilities) had criminal records.54 This is the type of result that occurs when Republicans are forced to compromise with Democrats, which illustrates the fallacy in the conventional wisdom that compromise is inherently virtuous. Here, it would lead to criminals being released on American streets. But Republicans signed on to the deal despite this provision, as Democrats were intransigent and it was the only way they could secure $1.3 billion in funding for border security—which wasn’t nearly enough.
“THE AMERICA LAST PARTY”
Everything about the moralizing Democrats’ immigration policy smacks of open borders—the New York Times made their stance explicit with a column titled, “There’s Nothing Wrong with Open Borders.”55 The left often frames this argument in moral terms, such as Nancy Pelosi proclaiming, “A wall is an immorality between countries.” But why is it immoral for a sovereign nation to protect its border and its citizens? Why is a wall immoral when other forms of border enforcement are not, such as a so-called “technological” border that Pelosi claims to support?56 Was it immoral when she and virtually all other Democratic Party leaders gave impassioned speeches in recent years stressing the imperative of border security and preventing illegal immigration? Isn’t one of the central duties of government to protect its own citizens and ensure their rights? How twisted must one’s moral compass be to believe that protecting noncitizens is more important than protecting citizens? It is not immoral to enforce our borders; it is immoral not to.
Similarly, how is it fair—or moral—for Democrats to favor blanket amnesty for illegals when so many other immigrants play by the rules and abide by the rule of law? In early June 2019, House Democrats voted for the American Dream and Promise Act, which would grant full citizenship to almost three million illegals—most brought here illegally by their parents but also incorporating some adults who entered illegally, including criminals with violent records. Congressman Steve Scalise said the bill is “only a dream for criminals” because it blocks access to state and federal gang databases, prevents felons and gang members from being referred to ICE for deportation, grants amnesty to violent criminals, and provides no funds for border security. “It’s simple: Republicans want safety from crime, and Democrats want sanctuary for criminals,” tweeted Scalise.57 The night before a Democratic presidential debate in June, Elizabeth Warren called for total decriminalization of border violations, understanding that if the violations are only civil there will be no detentions, so anyone who wants to come to the United States would likely be able to do so with virtual impunity.58
Pelosi’s insistence that a border wall is immoral makes a mockery of our legal immigration system. Mollie Hemingway aptly quoted Bill Clinton on this point: “We are a nation of immigrants, but we’re also a nation of laws. It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws we have seen in recent years and we must do more to stop it.”59 The logical extension of Pelosi’s argument is that it’s immoral for a sovereign nation to exist—because if it’s immoral to prevent entry of foreigners, then it’s immoral at any level, meaning there can be no morally justifiable exclusion. Since the media agree with her, they did not press Pelosi on the outrageousness, incoherence, and moral bankruptcy of her claim. Congressman Dan Crenshaw highlighted the folly of the Democrats’ stance. “The extreme rhetoric surrounding the border security debate has turned radical ideas into aggressive action,” he tweeted. “Vandalizing buildings & targeting our border agents is a fast way to discredit your argument. Incredible that enforcing our laws is somehow seen as morally corrupt.”60 Democrats have lurched so far left—so far from the rule of law—that they brazenly support lawbreaking and lawbreakers.
With the media’s support, however, Democrats continue to trespass on the moral high ground on immigration and demonize Republicans, despite the indefensibility of their position. In a fiery exchange between Congressman Matt Gaetz and CNN host Chris Cuomo, Cuomo suggested it’s convenient for Republicans that illegal aliens kill Americans because it advances the Republican argument against illegal immigration. Gaetz responded, “You think it’s convenient for us that people are dead at the hands of illegal aliens?” Cuomo replied, “Yes.… You put a premium on certain lives and not others.”61
Columnist George Neumayr exposes the immorality of the moralizing leftists’ open-borders advocacy:
They assert out of thin air the inalienable right of foreigners to claim citizenship, as if governments exist not to serve the good of the people who form them but the abstract rights of those outside of that government. If the Republicans are the America First party, the Democrats increasingly resemble the America Last party, fighting
not to preserve a stable, secure, and orderly government for Americans but to sustain a fantasy against common sense that prioritizes the demands of foreigners. Where is the morality in that? It is simply injustice to one’s own citizens dressed up as “humanitarianism”—a policy as unjust as parents who, in determining the security of their home, give greater consideration to strangers than their own children.62
Neumayr notes that leftists abandon their zealotry for these principles when applied to them personally, which is why all the well-fed politicians have walls, fences, and gates around their own homes. This is a microcosm of leftist advocacy across the board—they are, as we’ve shown, more generous than anyone else with other people’s money but statistically less generous than conservatives in private charitable contributions.
Another glaring example of leftists’ hypocrisy is their meltdown when President Trump announced his plan to send illegal immigrants to sanctuary cities. Some 170 cities and counties have sanctuary laws that prohibit law enforcement officials from assisting federal immigration authorities, and some cities actually impede enforcement. Trump would obviously prefer not to release illegal immigrants anywhere in the United States, but ICE lacks detention facilities and there is a shortage of judges to adjudicate asylum and deportation cases. So why not release them into cities that claim they want them?63 Cher, the great conscience of the left, was having none of it. “I Understand Helping struggling Immigrants,” she tweeted, “but my city (Los Angeles) isn’t taking care of its own. what about the 50,000+Citizens who live on the streets. ppl who live below poverty line, & hungry? If my State Can’t Take Care of Its Own How Can it Take Care of More.”64 Sounds like a pretty good argument against the leftists who run Los Angeles and liberalism in general, but that would be completely lost on Cher.
“WHY HASN’T THIS MADE HEADLINES?”
While Democrats shamelessly downplay criminality among illegal aliens, reportedly one in five U.S. prison inmates is a “criminal alien.”65 Data from the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts indicate that of the nation’s ninety-four federal districts, the top five for the highest number of defendants convicted and sentenced to prison in fiscal year 2018 were those along the U.S.-Mexico border. These districts cover the southern border from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico. The lesson, writes columnist Terence Jeffrey, is that “[t]he political leaders of this nation have known for years that the sort of criminal activity that is prosecuted in federal courts—as demonstrated by the government’s own data on federal court convictions—is disproportionately focused along the nation’s southern border. And they have not fixed it.”66
A recent report from the Government Accountability Office suggests 91 percent of U.S. criminal aliens from 2011 to 2016 were from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Among them, there were 4.9 million arrests for 7.5 million offenses. The arrests include some one million drug crimes, a half million assaults, 133,800 sex offenses, 24,200 kidnappings, 33,000 homicide-related offenses, and 1,500 terrorism-related crimes. U.S. taxpayers spent more than $15 billion to imprison these criminals in federal, state, and local facilities. Investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson asks, “Why hasn’t this made headlines?”67
Why, indeed? In 2017 and 2018, ICE officers made 266,000 arrests of aliens with criminal records, including those charged or convicted of 100,000 assaults, 30,000 sex crimes, and 4,000 violent killings.68 According to John Jones, chief of the Intelligence Counterterrorism Division with the Texas Department of Public Safety, in the last seven years in Texas alone, more than 4,000 illegal aliens have been jailed for sexual assault and 62 percent of these involved assaults against children.69 How would AOC and other proponents of eliminating ICE propose we deal with all these people, if at all? Then again, why would AOC and other Democrats worry about the ridiculousness of their position when they’ve managed to convince all but 37 percent of Americans that a border wall is wrong?
This shows the power of media and Democratic propaganda—as recently as 2013, an ABC News/Washington Post survey found that 65 percent of Americans supported building a 700-mile fence along the border with Mexico and adding 20,000 border patrol agents. Fifty-two percent even supported the wall if it would cost $46 billion, which is much higher than President Trump’s request. Earlier polls showed similar results. In 2006, a Time/SRBI poll found that 52 percent of Democrats favored “building a security fence along the 2000-mile US-Mexican border.”70
Democrats have done a masterful but disgraceful job portraying those who support border enforcement as racists. They oppose almost anything Trump supports, even if they recently favored it. They won’t even agree to compromise if Trump makes major concessions, because they won’t allow him any political victory on immigration. In fact, it’s clear they don’t want to solve the problem, preferring to keep it as a roiling issue that’s useful for demonizing Republicans. It is stunning that Democrats now uniformly oppose the national sovereignty of the United States. Former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Adams has even said she is open to noncitizens and minors voting in municipal elections.71 It’s easy to predict that this position will quickly become much more popular within her party.
“BLACK AMERICANS ARE DISPROPORTIONATELY IMPACTED BY ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION”
If alien criminality doesn’t bother the left, how about the effects of illegal immigration on jobs and wages? U.S. Civil Rights commissioner Peter Kirsanow observes that black Americans are disproportionately impacted by illegal immigration, with black males being more likely to face competition from illegals. “What happens is you eliminate the rungs on the ladder because a sizable number of black men don’t have access to entry-level jobs,” said Kirsanow. “It is not just the competition and the unemployment of blacks. It also depresses the wage levels.” Kirsanow’s comments are consistent with a Civil Rights Commission study in 2010 showing illegal immigration has depressed both wages and employment rates for low-skilled Americans, including a disproportionate number of black men.72
While Democrats portray all illegal immigrants as helpless victims, they can’t explain the mobs who stormed the border in San Diego at the beginning of 2019. Some 150 people tried to climb over and under the border fence, and some became hostile and violent, throwing rocks at border agents. When the Border Patrol fired tear gas, smoke, and pepper spray at the rock throwers—who were part of a caravan from Central America—leftists condemned the officials, not the rioters. Homeland Security spokeswoman Katie Waldman reported that none of the attackers were injured and that they appeared to be staging a photo-op in front of “conveniently invited media.”
A similar incident occurred in November 2018, when congressional Democrats and their media enablers also decried the use of tear gas as cruel.73 While depicting all members of these caravans as victims of America, Democrats didn’t disclose that nearly one-third of women in such groups report they were sexually abused during their journey to the border. Sixty-eight percent of the migrant and refugee populations entering Mexico report being victims of violence during their transit, often at the hands of gangs, other criminal organizations, and Mexican security forces assigned to protect them—all according to a 2017 report from Doctors Without Borders.74
The left constantly prioritizes illegals over the safety and interests of American citizens. Oakland mayor Libby Schaaf, after receiving a courtesy call from ICE informing her of an upcoming raid on illegal aliens in her city, warned the illegals in advance. The raid predictably failed to locate large numbers of criminal illegals in the area.75 “What she did is no better than a gang lookout yelling, ‘Police!’ when a police cruiser comes in the neighborhood, except she did it to a whole community,” said then-acting ICE director Thomas Homan. “There’s over 800 significant public safety threat criminals… that we are unable to locate because of that warning, so that community’s a lot less safe than it would have been.” A year later Mayor Schaaf defended her actions and called for ICE to be abolished.76
Such calls for dismantli
ng ICE are spreading fast through the Democratic Party. AOC put the onus on President Trump to explain why ICE shouldn’t be abolished. “No one should feel unsafe in the United States of America. And that includes our amazing and beautiful and productive immigrant community and moreover, the one thing the president has not talked about is the fact he has systematically engaged in the violation of international human rights borders—human rights on our border.… The president should be really defending why we are funding such an agency at all because right now what we are seeing is death.”77 The demonization of ICE agents as murderers is a natural outgrowth of these demands. Democratic congresswoman Mary Gay Scanlon explicitly made this claim during a House Judiciary Committee meeting on border security, when she compared U.S. border officials to Nazis “back in Germany” who were “just following orders.”78
AOC engaged in further demagoguery in June 2019 with an Instagram Live video. “The U.S. is running concentration camps on our southern border and that is exactly what they are,” she declared. “… If that doesn’t bother you… I want to talk to the people that are concerned enough with humanity to say that ‘never again’ means something.”79 AOC, of course, knows Democratic administrations used these same detention facilities—but unsurprisingly, they avoided historically illiterate comparisons to the Holocaust, in which six million Jews were killed through gassing, starvation, and death squads. By comparison, in border detention facilities, authorities provide detained illegal immigrants with meals, healthcare, clothing, and shelter, and eventually release them.80
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