Imagine a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate who opposed undocumented immigration on left-wing economic grounds.
This candidate would argue that it was depressing the wages of the lowest-paid workers and of legal immigrants. This candidate would vow to raid and prosecute the big businesses that employed undocumented workers.
At the same time, this Democrat would convincingly reject the wall, the caging of kids and other such performative cruelty, and white-nationalist bigotry.
Would that Democrat - all other things being equal - do better against other Democrats, or worse?
That would depend on how charismatic the candidate was, how logically sound the arguments were and, most importantly, what kind of campaign the Republicans launched against the candidate.
I think so. I disagree, obviously, but I think hatred of immigrants is very common across the political spectrum, and not just in the US, either. It’s worse in other countries with ethnic national identities. But despite being built and run by immigrants, the US is falling into the same trap. I think immigration and its cousin free trade are both areas where the popular sentiment in the country leans towards the Republicans. I feel the same about guns. If democrats started supporting gun rights and tariffs, and stopped supporting immigrant rights, they’d win a lot more votes. And perhaps, like you imply, they’d curb a lot of the absurd ideas, like border walls and daycare concentration camps. Doesn’t mean I’d agree with them, but it would probably be better than the situation we have now.
There are many more voters who would hear “I am fighting for you” than would hear “I am willing to say demonstrably false things to get elected.” Probably five to one, at least.
But they aren’t distributed evenly. So if that candidate was running for a seat in a highly educated suburb, it might be a bad decision. If they’re running for a seat with a lot of white working class voters, then different story.
I don’t think it’s so much a matter of being “for” or “against” undocumented immigration.
Right now, the US is taking a criminal/military approach to the problem. Treat every undocumented immigrant like a felon. Aggressively hunt them down, lock them up and throw them out. Create a dangerous atmosphere by publicly painting all undocumented aliens as violent criminals. Combat the problem with hate and fear.
There are other solutions besides totally open borders, no matter what they say on Fox. This military/criminal approach is very expensive, it costs, IIRC, somewhere between 25K and 50K a head to incarcerate and deport an illegal immigrant.
We could help encourage stability in the home countries. This administration’s policy of trying to bring certain classes of low paying jobs back to the US is self-defeating. Simply, if you don’t want “those people” here, let them have their car battery factories and food processing plants back.
Recognize that some of these immigrants are deserving of asylum. Develop sponsorship programs. Develop a program for employers in agriculture and food processing to hire incoming immigrants. Drop the absolutely insane fiction that there are Americans clamoring to pick fruit and butcher livestock.
I’m always surprised when I hear people call the immigrant interviews to determine eligibility for asylum worthless -because “they” will just lie. I’m sure our officials have intelligence on these countries. They know who the bad actors are. They know which towns and areas are run by cartels that terrorize the residents. Make an effort to sort it out.
There are solutions out there that are built on kindness, not meanness.
Well, first I’d like to suppose there is a Democratic candidate who does NOT oppose undocumented immigration. I believe that all of the declared presidential candidates support legal immigration and oppose illegal immigration. Why do you think otherwise?
The Democrat would have to walk a very fine line, between “I am against illegal immigration for economic reasons but building a wall is racism”.
Only the big ones?
Raids on businesses that use illegal immigrants leads to additional problems. The first is that the reason they can get jobs is that they will work for cheap. So harvesting just got more expensive. And hiring illegal immigrants because they are cheap is a problem that crosses ideological lines.
And the implementation of such a plan presents problems as well. Suppose it works, and businesses don’t want to hire illegal immigrants. Would they be allowed to ask for proof of citizenship before deciding whether to hire? The harder they try to exclude illegal immigrants, the more they expose themselves to complaints about discrimination.
Plus, you raid a company and find that there are 100 illegal immigrants working there. What do you do with them? Deport them? Put them in detention? Let them go and tell them to get in line for a green card? That takes years. What do they do in the meantime?
The main obstacle to this is that many Americans don’t want an approach of “we have it good, they have it bad, therefore let’s make them well off so that they stop coming here.” It’s like a rich guy with a mansion in a poor neighborhood being asked, why don’t you just buy everyone around you a nice house so they won’t keep trespassing on your property?
Many Americans want a situation where the United States has it good, central America and Mexico have it bad, millions of central Americans and Mexicans want to come to the United States*** and cannot, because of a wall or border defenses. ***
“Encourage stability in their home countries”? Short of invading their countries and installing a new government there is no way to do this. We have been trying to stabilize Latin America with varying degrees of success since ww2.
If we recognize that some of the immigrants are eligible for asylum, how do we determine this? Maybe some kind of hearing. Hearings take time, what do we do with them in the meantime? Do we let them go and hope they come back in time for the hearings, or do we keep them in custody until the hearing? If we let them go, then we have declared open borders for those willing to skip a hearing. If we keep them in custody until the hearing then we have an entire political party demagogue about concentration camps and accusing people of acting upon “hate and fear”.
By their own words, this administration places value on harming migrant families and making them suffer, for deterrent purposes. Is it “demagoguing” to point out that the Trump administration has declared a policy of purposefully harming migrant families and children?
Maybe the hypothetical Democrat of the OP could suggest that we change the laws and policies to automatically deport them all back to Mexico or Guatemala or wherever they came from, and let them apply for asylum or a green card from there.
I can only assume that you mean proof that they are authorized to work in the United States, not proof of citizenship. While it is a common misconception that you have to be a citizen in order to work, that is actually not the case, and there does seem to be an easy conflation that goes very quickly from “non-citizen” to the popular slur of “illegal”.
So far as that goes, employers are required to see proof of authorization before they can hire them, why do you think that that would change?
It would be more like asking the rich person living in the mansion as to why they refuse to help fund the police in the neighborhood, where the lack of law and order keeps causing people to take shelter on his property.
We are responsible for quite a bit of the problems they have. Between the drug trade that our drug addicted population creates demand for, the history of the region where we played imperialist over things as petty as bananas, our policy of sending people back to their countries after they have been trained and hardened in our gangs and prison system, and our current activities of cutting aid, as well as reducing trade, means that they are buried in our shit, and then we have the audacity to call them a shithole country and refuse to help to clean up or even ameliorate the effects of our mess.
He or she would probably do pretty well in the primary, but then lose to Hillary Clinton. He or she would then come back in 2019 to run a campaign where everyone adopted his or her positions.
And if they didn’t enter the country illegally, they wouldn’t need to be in detention. So I don’t see how your statement addresses the situation. Guatemala is a shithole, and Mexico is better but not by a lot. Accordingly, many people want to enter the US, both to work and to get away from their shithole country of origin. That doesn’t mean the hypothetical Democrat candidate thinks they should all be allowed to stay - he or she is explicitly against illegal immigration because it depresses wages.
If they are in the country illegally, we can deport them, or put them in [del]concentration camps[/del] detention facilities. Or let them go. Hearings take time, as puddleglum points out. Getting a green card takes years, as I point out. Letting them go doesn’t address the issue - they can’t work without a green card, so they can’t support themselves. Do we hold them in detention? I thought that was a horrible violation of their rights.
To be fair, they know that they would lie in such a situation. That’s not a judgement, I would too. If the only way to secure myself and my family was to lie to some govt officials, I’d lose no sleep over it.
That they then try to make this into a moral failing of those trying to escape poverty and violence is more than a bit in bad faith.