Wall Street Journal (Opinion)
By James Taranto
August 19, 2015
What
do Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have in common? We can think of lots
of possible answers, but the one we have in mind has to do, believe it
or not, with policy:
Both have stated, in rather strong terms, their opposition to open
immigration.
To
be sure, there are big differences in both substance and emphasis. The
“Issues” page on Sanders’s campaign website lists eight, immigration not
among them. The “Positions”
page on Trump’s campaign website lists only one, “Immigration Reform.”
In a June speech to the National Association of Latino Elected and
Appointed Officials, Sanders expressed his support for “the 2013
comprehensive immigration reform legislation in the United
States Senate” as well as for President Obama’s administrative actions on behalf of illegal aliens.
But as we shall see, when speaking in general terms about the subject, the two sound almost identical.
Trump
made news earlier this week when he announced his 1,900-word
immigration platform. National Review, a longtime supporter of
more-restrictive immigration laws, responded
with a critical editorial:
The
plan doesn’t address what to do with illegal immigrants already here,
which is defensible because enforcement should be the first priority.
But Trump’s mouth has gotten
far out in front of his written plan, and he continues to talk up a
cracked version of amnesty. On Sunday’s Meet the Press, he reiterated
his intention to deport, then re-import, current illegal immigrants—a de
facto amnesty that is more costly, time-consuming,
and logistically fraught than any currently on the table. Additionally,
Trump’s stated intention to avoid separating families by sending
American-born children with their parents is obviously illegal; the
United States government has no authority to deport
American citizens.
The
editorial also criticizes, among other things, Trump’s calls to make
Mexico pay for a border wall (“absurd”), to “impound all remittance
payments derived from illegal
wages” (“an impossibility”), and to deprive illegal aliens’ children of
birthright citizenship (“sure to be a nonstarter”).
Other
than that, it’s a pretty good plan. Seriously, that’s NR’s view! The
editorial’s headline: “Trump’s Immigration Plan Is a Good Start—for All
GOP Candidates.”
Not
all GOP candidates agree, especially with the bit about birthright citizenship. CBS News quotes Jeb Bush: “That’s a constitutional right. .
. . Mr. Trump can say he’s
for this because people are frustrated that it’s abused. We ought to
fix the problem rather than take away rights that are constitutionally
endowed.” CNN quotes Marco Rubio: “I’m open to doing things that prevent
people from coming to the U.S. to take advantage
of 14th Amendment, but I’m not in favor of repealing it.”
On
the other hand, when MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt asked Scott Walker if he thinks
birthright citizenship should be ended, he answered in the affirmative:
“Well, like I said,
Harry Reid said it’s not right for this country—I think that’s
something we should, yeah, absolutely, going forward—” When Hunt pressed
him on the matter, his answer became less clear, but as Politifact
noted in 2010, Reid was indeed against birthright citizenship for illegal aliens’ children (in 1993), before he was for it.
It
should be acknowledged that there is a respectable scholarly argument
that the 14th Amendment was not intended to grant citizenship to aliens’
children. NR’s editor,
Rich Lowry, has a link to a 2010 Texas Review of Law & Politics
article in which the University of Texas’ Lino Graglia makes the case.
Such a change, however, would require, if not a constitutional
amendment, then the overturning of a 19th-century Supreme
Court precedent (U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, 1898) and generations of law and
custom. Nonstarter indeed.
It’s
news to no one that immigration divides the Republican Party and
conservatives, with The Wall Street Journal editorial page and NR being,
respectively, the right’s
leading journalistic voices for less-restrictive and more-restrictive
policies. But the left is divided too, as demonstrated by this
fascinating exchange from Sanders’s interview last month with Vox’s Ezra
Klein:
Klein:
You said being a democratic socialist means a more international view. I
think if you take global poverty that seriously, it leads you to
conclusions that in the
US are considered out of political bounds. Things like sharply raising
the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders.
About sharply increasing—
Sanders: Open borders? No, that’s a Koch brothers proposal.
Klein: Really?
Sanders: Of course. That’s a right-wing proposal, which says essentially there is no United States—
Klein: But it would make—
Sanders: Excuse me—
Klein: It would make a lot of global poor richer, wouldn’t it?
Sanders:
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. If you believe in a nation state or in a country called the
United States or UK or Denmark or any other country, you have an
obligation in my view to do everything we can to help poor people. What
right-wing people in this country would love is an
open-border policy. 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.
To
put it another way: “Real immigration reform puts the needs of working
people first—not wealthy globetrotting donors. We are the only country
in the world whose immigration
system puts the needs of other nations ahead of our own. That must
change.”
Only that last quote isn’t from Sanders. It‘s the capsule summary of Trump’s immigration plan.
Sanders
goes on: “You know what youth unemployment is in the United States of
America today? If you’re a white high school graduate, it’s 33 percent,
Hispanic 36 percent,
African American 51 percent. You think we should open the borders and
bring in a lot of low-wage workers, or do you think maybe we should try
to get jobs for those kids?”
Trump
says virtually the same thing, with slightly different stats: “Today,
nearly 40% of black teenagers are unemployed. Nearly 30% of Hispanic
teenagers are unemployed.
For black Americans without high school diplomas, the bottom has fallen
out: more than 70% were employed in 1960, compared to less than 40% in
2000. . . . The influx of foreign workers holds down salaries, keeps
unemployment high, and makes it difficult for
poor and working class Americans . . . to earn a middle class wage.”
(As
an aside, part of what makes the Vox interview so interesting is
Klein’s incredulity. The policy-wonk wunderkind is so doctrinaire in his
thinking that he is astonished
to discover intellectual diversity on the left.)
Trump
also complains of legal aliens’ “welfare abuse” and illegal aliens’
“horrific crimes”—concerns Sanders did not raise in his Vox interview.
There may be some common
ground on the welfare question, though. In a piece last month for the
New Republic, writer Paul Blest noted that Sanders “gets his political
inspiration from Scandinavia—particularly Denmark, where 90 percent of
residents are of Danish descent.”
Blest’s
main point is that Sanders’s admiration for Nordic socialism explains
what Blest calls the senator’s “blind spot on race”—i.e., his impatience
with identity politics,
and in particular the Black Lives Matter movement. But he also notes
that his analysis makes apparent “the limits of democratic socialism in
America today”—to wit (and this is our analysis, not his), that the kind
of social solidarity on which the Danish welfare
state depends is much easier to achieve in a culturally homogeneous
country.
Immigration
is a curious issue in that it divides both left and right at a time of
high political polarization. International trade is another one, with
the reverse valence—i.e.,
conservatives are more pro-trade than liberals, who are more
pro-immigration than conservatives. Perhaps not surprisingly, trade is
another area where Trump and Sanders find common ground. Both are
stridently opposed to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, for which
National Review’s Kevin Williamson scores Trump:
The
real advantage of negotiating a trade deal that requires consensus
among such countries as Singapore and Australia is that these countries
generally have economic
policies that are superior to our own and better suited to the
realities of 21st-century markets and economic conditions. Which is to
say, it’s an opportunity to leverage Tony Abbott and the ghost of Lee
Kuan Yew against Barack Obama on the matter of free
markets—a desirable situation for conservatives.
Don’t
expect to hear any of that from Donald Trump, who imagines that the
global economy is a poker game and is transfixed by the phantasm of the
inscrutable Oriental
dealing from the bottom of the deck while the sneaky Latin sharpens his
machete.
Let’s give credit where due: Those National Review guys make a lot of sense when the subject is trade.
Two Mutters in One!
“So
as the facts of the White House cover-up now tumble out into open
court, it’s important to remember that if it hadn’t been for
Fitzgerald’s work, there’s little doubt
the Plame story would have simply faded into oblivion like so many
other disturbing suggestions of Bush administration misdeeds. And it
would have faded away because lots of high-profile journalists at The
New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, and NBC
wanted it to. In a sense, it was Watergate in reverse. Instead of
digging for the truth, lots of journalists tried to bury it.”—Eric
Boehlert, MediaMutters.org, Feb. 6, 2007
“Conservatives
are using the ongoing examination of Hillary Clinton’s State Department
emails to once again make a series of over-the-top accusations that
compare her
behavior to former President Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal. .
. . Over the years, Media Matters [sic] has cataloged at least 16
separate ‘Watergates’ the right has accused the Obama administration of.
. . . Watergate involved the president of the
United States soliciting a break-in of a political party’s
headquarters, suggesting payment of up to $1 million in hush money to
bribe the burglars, being ordered by the Supreme Court to produce secret
recordings of the planning for the cover-up of the burglary,
and the resignation of a president for the first time in U.S. history.
Unless the discussion is about events of that magnitude, it isn’t
Watergate.”—Oliver Willis, MediaMutters.org, Aug. 18, 2015
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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