In New Jersey, it’s illegal to pump your own gas, but you can legally drive a car even if you’re illegally in the country.
New Jersey became one of 16 states in the country to start offering driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants at the start of this month. It’s an unpopular idea that 62% of the state’s residents opposed in a 2018 Monmouth University poll and a bad one for a myriad of reasons. It’s also one that President Joe Biden supports — at least, that he supports now.
During Biden’s 2008 presidential campaign, he opposed driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants. At a Democratic primary debate in 2007, the moderator asked the candidates if they supported driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants. Biden flatly answered, “No,” without any further explanation, drawing some laughter from the audience. And in early 2008, the platform on his campaign website stated, “Senator Biden opposes issuing driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants.”
Good. Incentivizing illegal immigration will only lead to more of it and more of the negative impacts associated with it. Environmentalist Democrats shouldn’t want more gas-powered cars on the roads, emitting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Not to mention some illegal immigrants are criminals, flooding the labor pool with low-wage earners can hurt the working class by undercutting them and depressing their wages, and illegal immigrants are a net burden to taxpayers.
The old Biden may have agreed with those statements. If the new Biden does, he is ignoring those problems in order to appeal to his base.
Biden told an audience member at a 2019 campaign event that he had a plan to get driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. He also said he wanted to “change” the country’s immigration policy fundamentally.
This isn’t Biden’s first or even his biggest flip-flop. In one of the more prominent examples of a Biden flip-flop earlier in 2019, he also went from a popular stance to an unpopular one on abortion.
For decades, Biden supported the Hyde Amendment, which prevents federal Medicaid funding from paying for elective abortions. However, Biden stopped supporting it in June 2019. Now, his administration wants to repeal a policy that saves the lives of almost 60,000 pre-born babies per year.
Biden wasn’t dumb enough to compare repealing the Hyde Amendment to supporting the troops, like Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Seth Moulton, but he made a poor decision. The Hyde Amendment is popular: Fifty-eight percent support it, while 38% oppose it, according to a January Marist/Knights of Columbus poll. Instead, Biden decided to side with the Left over the lives of the unborn and the will of the people.
Not to mention Biden ran on fiscal responsibility and “kicking deficit spending” in 2008, according to his campaign website. Now, he proposes the $1.8 trillion American Families Plan.
Whether on illegal immigration, abortion, or the national debt, consistency isn’t Biden’s strength. Don’t expect it from him during the rest of this term.
Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a political reporter for NewBostonPost in Massachusetts. He is also a freelance writer who has been published in USA Today, the Boston Globe, Newsday, ESPN, the Detroit Free Press, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Federalist, and a number of other outlets.
