Who are the extremists on immigration? To listen to mainstream media, you would suppose it was Republicans. And certainly Donald Trump’s proposals — to the extent that they are specific — and the large number (though not yet a majority) of votes he has been receiving in Republican primaries, provide some warrant for saying that Republicans have changed.
Every Republican presidential nominee from 1980 to 2008 favored some form of legalization and path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. Trump’s rhetoric suggests that he does not.
But when it comes to Republican and Democratic voters, it is the Democrats who have changed their views. That’s the conclusion of the American Interest’s Via Meadia blog. Gallup polling shows that Republican opinion on whether immigrants “strengthen the nation” has remained about the same, with around 35 percent agreeing over the last 15 years. But opinion among Democrats has changed from what it was in the years from 1994 to 2004, with 78 percent now agreeing that immigrants “strengthen the nation.”
You might see that change as a response to the decline in immigration since the financial crisis and recession of 2007-09, or you might see it as a partisan riposte to the heated anti-immigrant rhetoric of some Republicans. But it also reflects — or has inspired — a change in position among Democratic politicians. As National Review’s editorialists write, both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders promised, at the debate hosted by Univision, to quit enforcing immigration law altogether. Clinton said she won’t deport any illegal immigrant except those with criminal records, and Sanders agreed.
This looks like an extension of the Obama administration policies of suspending enforcement of immigration laws for very large classes of illegal immigrants. Administration lawyers were defending the latest such suspension of the law at the Supreme Court yesterday, arguing that it is just an exercise of prosecutorial discretion.
But does the Democratic Party want to defend a policy of actual Open Borders in the political arena? Democrats could say it’s in line with the history of American immigration policy up to the 1920s, although first the states and then the federal government asserted and frequently exercised the right to exclude immigrants for public health reasons or because they appeared likely to be a burden to the taxpayers. But that’s out of line with public opinion which over the years has pretty consistently said that high rates of immigration were a good thing in the past but are a bad idea now.
I can see why Clinton and Sanders might consider themselves bound to outbid each other for the support of open borders activists. But I wonder whether Clinton has given any thought to the sustainability of her position in the general election.
