Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, 76, came of age at a time when the left was devoted to class struggle, not ethnic conflict. As a result, the self-proclaimed democratic socialist has tripped up time and again on the issue of immigration.
At the outset of his presidential campaign in 2015, Sanders took a sensible line on open borders for a candidate ostensibly devoted to improving the economic lot of working class Americans. In a summer 2015 interview with Ezra Klein of Vox, he expressed strident opposition to open borders:
“Open borders … is a Koch brothers proposal,” he thundered. (A “Koch Brothers proposal” is the harshest criticism Sanders can imagine.)
“That’s a right-wing proposal, which says essentially there is no United States,” he continued. “It would make everybody in America poorer—you’re doing away with the concept of a nation state, and I don’t think there’s any country in the world that believes in that. … Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country, I think we have to do everything we can to create millions of jobs.”
Sanders, of course, had a point: As Harvard economist George Borjas has demonstrated, mass immigration of low-skilled workers has had a markedly deleterious impact on the wages of working class Americans.
What Sanders failed to realize, however, is that unlike the 1970s, the backers of mass immigration are no longer just the Monopoly Man and his cognac-swilling friends from the Metropolitan Club. Rather, the liberal-on-immigration coalition is now a bizarre hodge-podge of Chamber of Commerce Republicans, doctrinaire libertarians, and identity politics warriors.
The latter are increasingly in charge of the Democratic party, so Sanders, a relatively savvy politician, quickly moved away from his heretical line. By January 2016, he was toeing the standard Democratic line on immigration.
Still, old habits die hard. And so the Vermont senator found himself in political trouble late last month when he declined to endorse the campaign to abolish Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE), the agency within the Homeland Security Department that enforces immigration laws at home. Support for “Abolish ICE,” which appears to have been hatched as a Twitter campaign by left-wing activists, is increasingly demanded of Democratic politicians by their base. It’s the new proxy question for whether or not a Democratic politician takes a sufficiently liberal line on immigration. There’s now a House bill, sponsored by Oregon’s Earl Blumenauer, that aims to abolish the agency.
And so, Sanders caved. Earlier this month, he announced on Twitter that he does, in fact, back abolishing ICE.
Bernie Sanders, for all his idealism, is a politician, of course. And he’s clearly planning to run for president in 2020. So this was a nakedly political move. But it might not be a smart one: The bad news for the senator is that among the general public, abolishing ICE is supported by about 15 percent of Americans. There’s no word on whether the Koch Brothers are part of that 15 percent, by the way.
