As the mid-term election approaches, the subject of illegal immigration is again heating up. The two major parties, once in general agreement on the issue, now have diametrically opposing views.
Republicans want to eliminate illegal immigration, while welcoming legal immigrants. On the other side, Democrats are resisting all efforts to control our borders. Though they avoid terms like “open borders,” it’s become apparent that is exactly what they want. They’ve made that clear by their sanctuary city policies, their reckless and unconscionable attacks on those who enforce our immigration laws, and by their endless enticements for illegal immigration, like free healthcare, in-state college tuition, and even voting rights.
But that position is a stunning reversal of their immigration stance just a few short years ago.
Consider these words, written into the Democrat Party platform of 2008, “We cannot continue to allow people to enter the United States undetected, undocumented, and unchecked… We need to secure our borders, and support additional personnel, infrastructure, and technology on the border and at our ports of entry. We need additional Customs and Border Protection agents equipped with better technology and real-time intelligence.”
In a 2009 speech, Democrat Senator Chuck Schumer proclaimed that the “primary goal of comprehensive immigration reform must be to dramatically curtail future illegal immigration.”
Even liberal icon, Barack Obama, saw things differently back then. In “The Audacity of Hope,” published in 2006, he wrote, “When I see Mexican flags waved at pro-immigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I’m forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration.”
In those days, national pride was the norm, and illegal immigration was not – even for Democrats.
So what could have caused such a dramatic shift in a basic tenet of the Democrat Party? It wasn’t some spiritual awakening, but something much more cynical.
In 2010, an extensive report published by the Center for Immigration Studies confirmed the long-held assumption that new immigrants overwhelmingly align with the Democrat Party. Among other things, it concluded that “…large-scale immigration has caused a steady drop in presidential Republican vote shares throughout the country.”
Democrat Party leaders saw a golden opportunity, so before you could utter the words “open borders,” they began to work towards that end.
With their new goal in mind, they needed to convince their constituents that border security had become passé. They only had to exploit that bottomless well of liberal compassion. “We are a nation of immigrants,” they cried, equating illegal border crossings to legal immigration. They endlessly regurgitated the words inscribed at the base of our Statue of Liberty, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses.” They lionized illegal aliens whenever they could. They wept over those families separated after illegally crossing our borders, and sanctimoniously waved images of caged youths, photos that were actually taken during the Obama Administration. And after inciting anti-border hysteria, they fueled the fire by leveling scurrilous and unsubstantiated charges of racism and xenophobia against anyone supporting strong borders. If Democrats needed another reason to support open borders, they found it in the resistance movement, and its blind opposition to President Trump’s agenda.
So Democrats now seem more concerned about the plight of illegal aliens than the future of our country or the safety of our fellow citizens.
That’s evidenced by their callous disregard for the countless American men, women, and children brutalized or killed by people who have no right to be in this country. That is not a Republican talking point; it’s a fact, reported in the 2017 statistics compiled by I.C.E. It is corroborated by studies like the one published by the CATO Institute in 2018. While Democrats skew those numbers to suggest that illegal aliens commit fewer crimes than do American citizens, most angel families, those forced to deal with profound personal losses, would vehemently disagree. Regardless of the statistics, we can all be certain of one thing: Those lost family members would be alive today if their killers had never entered our country.
Not all the third world citizens drawn here are sympathetic figures, desperate to assimilate into America’s melting pot, to contribute to America’s success. Human nature dictates that many are self-serving and opportunistic. Some are, indeed, hardened criminals. And though the vast majority may be honorable, they’re also likely to be uneducated and unskilled, attracted here, not by the opportunities America offers, but by the incentives Democrats offer.
None of that matters to open-border Democrats. When they ultimately reclaim political power, they will undoubtedly open the floodgates. The resulting influx of unvetted aliens will eventually give Democrats their solid, unbeatable voting bloc, and we will have the elements of a single-party system. But America will have evolved into a vastly different country, no longer a beacon of hope and land of opportunity for hard-working immigrants. Those throngs of third-world citizens will bring with them the poverty, the social mores, and problems endemic in their countries. America’s values and traditions would become secondary, as liberal Democrats rush to accommodate their every whim, and we will become what they left behind.
