On Thursday, the House voted 228-195 against sanctuary cities. Not surprisingly, it went down along party lines.
Am I the only one who finds it hard to believe that a member of the U.S. House would support a city that violates federal laws? Would we have a similar vote if some U.S. cities decided to make abortion illegal? or not issue “same-sex marriage” licenses? or a sanctuary cities for employers who refuse to contribute to Social Security? or citizens who refuse to file tax returns? Would Democrats be OK with that?
My guess is that Planned Parenthood might object to a U.S. county that made abortion illegal. The execs would be on the phone with their friends in the House and Senate within minutes!
DNC chairman Tom Perez would probably go loco if someone told him that a county refuses to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. He’d probably use profanity to say the law of the land has to be “f—— obeyed.”
Senator Sanders would probably give a long speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate saying that employers who refuse to pay their Social Security contributions are violating the law.
So why is violating immigration laws not treated the same way? I don’t get it!
In this article, Mr. Beinart, who is a very strong liberal, shows how the party has changed over the last 15 years. At one time, and not that long ago, Democrats saw illegal immigration very differently:
In 2005, a left-leaning blogger wrote, “Illegal immigration wreaks havoc economically, socially, and culturally; makes a mockery of the rule of law; and is disgraceful just on basic fairness grounds alone.”
In 2006, a liberal columnist wrote that “immigration reduces the wages of domestic workers who compete with immigrants” and that “the fiscal burden of low-wage immigrants is also pretty clear.” His conclusion: “We’ll need to reduce the inflow of low-skill immigrants.”
That same year, a Democratic senator wrote, “When I see Mexican flags waved at proimmigration 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.”
The blogger was Glenn Greenwald. The columnist was Paul Krugman. The senator was Barack Obama.
So what happened? How did the Democratic Party go from saying these things to where it is now? I think that they bought into the “demographics” arguments and came to believe that they would win elections by simply getting Hispanics to show up.
It was a great idea until Mr. Trump proved them wrong in 2016. (Actually, it did not work in 2014, either, but they convinced themselves that those were off-year election results and that the electorate would be different in 2016.)
Based on the aforementioned House vote, it does not look as though Democrats have figured out what their problem is. Maybe some Democrat out there will read what Glenn Greenwald, Paul Krugman, and none other than Barack Obama used to say about illegal immigration.
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