PHILADELPHIA — There has never been a sharper contrast between the two parties on immigration than the Democrats and Republicans have presented at their national conventions over the past week.
The Republican National Convention featured the family members of Americans of various races and ethnicities who were killed by illegal immigrants. The Democratic National Convention on Monday night had illegal immigrants speaking from the podium.
Donald Trump has vowed to be tougher on illegal immigration than any recent president (he occasionally mentions a removal program under Dwight Eisenhower that was regarded as successful but carried a derogatory name as a precedent). The Democrats at their convention denied the legitimacy of the phrase, with a sign on the podium declaring, “No human being is illegal.”
Democrats have long showcased DREAMers, a sympathetic subset of undocumented immigrants who frequently arrived with their parents when they were too young to make their own decisions.
“I know she will fight to keep our families together,” said young Astrid Silver of presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. “I know she will.”
The highlighted individuals are often high school valedictorians. At the GOP convention, Trump found sympathetic victims of crimes committed by illegal immigrants and called attention to their grade point averages.
Trump’s been less consistent on immigration than conventional wisdom has it, but he’s generally associated with deporting 11 million illegal immigrants, a pause on Muslim immigration and tougher immigration controls in general. Some of these ideas are viewed as extreme. While the so-called Muslim ban fared well in Republican exit polls, mass deportations frequently did not.
But the Democrats have gravitated to the opposite extreme, stepping perilously close to arguing deportation is illegitimate as a tool for enforcing immigration laws. People should only be eligible from the United States if they commit other crimes — and perhaps only very serious crimes at that.
This is yet another Hillary Clinton era departure from Bill Clinton’s centrist Democratic politics. Back when he was president, he appointed an immigration reform commission headed by Barbara Jordan, an African-American liberal Democratic congresswoman from Texas. Here’s what she had to say about enforcement.
“Deportation is crucial,” Jordan wrote in her commission’s first report. “Credibility in immigration can be summed up in one sentence: Those who should get in, get in; those who should be kept out, be kept out; and those who should not be hear will be required to leave.”
Jordan agreed with today’s Democrats that the “top priorities for detention and removal, of course, are criminal aliens.” But, she added, “for the system to have credibility, people actually have to be removed at the end of the process.”
Such talk would not be welcome on the dais of the 2016 Democratic convention, even when delivered by a person with a history of civil rights activism.
Immigration is most damaging to Republicans when it is framed as a yes or no question on acceptance of Latinos in American society. Trump has given Democrats plenty of bulletin board material for arguing Republicans are on the wrong the side of that issue, a big mistake. Treating basic immigration enforcement as vaguely illegitimate, however, seems like a big mistake too.
