Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders took a strong stand on immigration in a speech to Latino officials in Nevada Friday.
Although he hasn’t spent much time on immigration since jumping into the 2016 Democratic presidential race, Sanders praised the Obama program deferring the deportation of young illegal immigrants as a good first step that should be built upon.
” Despite the central role they play in our economy and in our daily lives, undocumented workers are reviled by many for political gain and shunted into the shadows,” Sanders said to a crowd of Latinos in Las Vegas on Friday. “Let me be clear about where I stand. It is time for this disgraceful situation to end. This country faces enormous problems and they will not be solved unless we are united. It is time to end the politics of division on this country.”
Sanders has recently gained ground in polls of Democratic primary voters in New Hampshire, but the self-proclaimed socialist needs to move beyond white liberal support and do better among minorities to compete with Hillary Clinton. A Washington Post/ABC News survey found that Clinton was doing better with non-white Democrats than whites.
“I don’t know if he likes immigrants because he doesn’t seem to talk about immigrants. But sooner or later he’ll tell us,” Rep. Luis Gutiérrez, D-Ill., said on Larry King’s show last week. “I hope he likes immigrants. I haven’t heard him say anything. He’s been kind of quiet and silent. So I hope that when he sees this program he sees that there’s a lot of people waiting to hear from him.”
Sanders tried to address this concern in his speech to the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials. The conference was the country’s largest gathering of Hispanic policymakers.
“It is time to end the discussion — no ‘mass deportation’ or ‘self deportation,'” Sanders said. “We cannot and we should not be talking about sweeping up millions of men, women and children, many of whom have been in this country for years and we cannot allow a continuation of this discussion that we will just take people out of this country.”
“As is often said, we are a nation of immigrants,” he added. “For generations, families braved treacherous paths, often fleeing unspeakable poverty and violence, in search of better futures, for better lives for their children.”
Although Sanders hasn’t been vocal on immigration, his voting record is consistent with his current rhetoric. He voted against declaring English the official language of the U.S. government, building a fence along the Mexican border, restricting immigrant visas for skilled workers and reporting undocumented aliens who receive hospital treatment.
The previous day Hillary Clinton keynoted the conference, stating that she “will do everything that is possible under the law to go even further than what President Obama has attempted to achieve” on immigration.
She argued universal voter registration, apprenticeship programs and early childhood education, the only two parts of the platform the candidate has released thus far, are valuable to the Latino community.
