Whether you love or hate everything that has gone on since President Trump has been in office, one thing is indisputable: leftists aren’t being subtle about their positions anymore.
After years of paying lip service to the center and right while pretending they didn’t want completely open borders, the “there are no illegal people” crowd is admitting that they do.
Crossing the border without authorization should no longer be a crime, a group of nearly 250 immigrant defense and civil rights wrote in a letter to congressional leaders Wednesday, highlighting growing discontent with a nearly century-old law that President Donald Trump used to carry out his seven-week experiment with systematic family separations at the border.
The letter demands a broad rollback to immigration enforcement measures signed into law by Bill Clinton back in 1996, which critics view as the beginning of a major buildup of the detention and deportation systems.
“An entire generation of people in this country have never experienced immigration apart from criminalization, as law enforcement and immigration enforcement functions have merged to arrest, detain, surveill, punish, and exile people of color,” the letter reads. “The abuses of these criminal legal and immigration systems have devastated our communities.”
There are plenty of people who have “experienced immigration apart from criminalization” because they came here, you know, legally. That’s like saying that people have never experienced driving a car apart from criminalization when all you’re talking about are car thieves.
There is plenty that needs to be changed about legal immigration policy and even more that should be addressed about illegal immigration. All of it requires thoughtful, nuanced deliberation and discussion, not a sweeping progressive whitewashing.
Sadly, many on the right have been yielding ground for so long, while letting the narrative about illegal immigration be hijacked by Democrats and the media, that any common sense approaches that feature an adherence to the rule of law can now — and will be — portrayed as cruel, racist, and all of the other epithets that the social justice warrior crowd have been trained to reflexively toss around.
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