There was a time earlier in this century when Democrats supported strong measures to protect the border. In 2015, Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) feared that immigrants were undercutting the wages of citizens.
“There is a reason why Wall Street and all of corporate America likes immigration reform, and it is not, in my view, that they’re staying up nights worrying about undocumented workers,” Sanders said in 2015. “What I think they are interested in is seeing a process by which we can bring low-wage labor of all levels into this country to depress wages for Americans, and I strongly disagree with that.”
Bernie sounded kind of like a Republican there, didn't he?
But Democrats had all but abandoned the position that illegal immigration is bad for America, at least, until now. In order to get GOP support for military aid for Ukraine and Israel, as well as security assistance for Taiwan, Senate Democrats are swallowing hard and accepting several Republican ideas about border security to get that aid package for Ukraine and Israel released.
And it's a far cry from Democrats' rhetoric in 2020.
By 2020, top Democrats were instead calling for the decriminalization of the border. On Capitol Hill, Democrats spoke more positively about immigration than any party had in the country’s history, according to an analysis of congressional speeches. During Biden’s campaign, he encouraged immigrants to come and later appointed advocates of looser immigration policies to his administration, as Dexter Filkins of The New Yorker has noted. Today, liberals describe border-security measures that the Democratic Party once would have favored as severe, cruel or “Trump-era.”
The White House continues to insist that Joe Biden never encouraged illegal migration before taking office. This is a lie that's been proven to be untrue many times over.
The fruits of Biden's encouragement of illegals to enter the country are near catastrophic. Communities on the border are being absolutely overwhelmed with illegal aliens. The border patrol is stretched so thin that agents have been pulled from patrolling the border to protect against the drug trade to act in an administrative capacity processing illegal aliens.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told Border Patrol agents on Monday that the current release rate for illegals apprehended at the southern border is "above 85%," sources told Fox News.
None of this is news. What may be different is the Democrats' willingness to accept some Trump-era policies like "Remain in Mexico" and building more of the wall along the Southern border.
Biden's biggest proposed change in border policy is to substantially restrict the immigration parole policy that has resulted in hundreds of thousands of people being let into the United States. This has been a major sticking point in negotiations on border security and would be a huge win for Republicans.
Other changes proposed by Biden:
- Asylum-seekers who cross the border illegally and do not first seek refuge in a country they traveled through are being rejected for asylum, reminiscent of Trump's so-called transit ban.
- Homeland Security is expanding a program to deport families faster.
- The State Department is readying to use foreign aid to assist another country's deportation efforts for the first time in history — similar to a plan first pursued by Trump.
- Venezuela will also begin to cooperate with U.S. deportation efforts for the first time in years, senior administration officials said Thursday.
None of these policy changes were even on the radar six months ago. Now they're all about to be part of a deal on border security in exchange for funding Israel's war with Hamas and Ukraine's war with Russia.
Democrats are running scared on immigration, and the GOP is benefitting from it.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member