The Democrats have a new candidate they’re re-branding as tougher on illegal immigration than Donald Trump. In her first ad on the issue, she highlighted Trump’s opposition to a Democrat-sponsored immigration bill he opposed, spuriously claiming that she supported increasing the number of border patrol agents, while Trump opposed it.
This week, she’s released another misleading ad claiming she was a tough “border state prosecutor (who) took on drug cartels and jailed gang members”. The narrator laughably concludes, “Fixing the border is tough, so is Kamala Harris”.
Democrats have denied that she was Biden’s border czar but he did formally task her on March 24, 2021 “to lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle… in…stemming the migration to our southern border.” Instead, she bumptiously preached about “root causes,” which will take decades or centuries to address and frequently linked the crisis to climate change rather than the administration’s own misguided policies. The crisis deepened on her watch until this year, when the administration finally decided to get tougher with an election looming. Ms. Harris should be asked what she’d have done differently.
Her track record on immigration, which voters routinely rate the most important issue of the campaign behind the economy/inflation, deserves scrutiny but is likely to get cursory treatment even if there’s more than one debate. Moderators should start by asking Ms. Harris about the radical views she articulated the last time she ran for President. At the first primary debate in 2019, Ms. Harris and all the other candidates raised their hands to indicate they supported providing free health care for illegal immigrants. Does she still think it’s a cracking idea to incentivize lawbreaking after watching more than 10 million migrants illegally storm our borders since she took office?
When asked in the same debate if illegal migrants should be deported if they’d committed no other offenses, she replied, “absolutely not”. She also said that she disagreed with the Obama administration on its deportation policy, bragging that she issued a “directive to the sheriffs of my state that they did not have to comply with (deportation) detainers”.
Does she still oppose building a wall, which she called “a complete waste of taxpayer money” in 2020? And, while we’re at it, perhaps she could explain why she’d like to hire more border patrol agents now when, in 2018, she compared ICE agents to the KKK while also insinuating in an interview with MSNBC that year that ICE should be abolished or reformulated.
Trump wants to debate Harris three times, but so far, Ms. Harris has agreed to just one debate on ABC, where the news operation is overseen by Dana Walden, who is, according to a New York Times piece this week, a close friend of the Vice President. The illegal immigration issue is too big to ignore, but expect the debate to be framed in the friendliest possible terms for her on ABC. Trump will be grilled on why he opposed the Democratic legislation and might be asked unfair, loaded questions like, “Do you still support putting children at the border in cages”?
Illegal border crossings on the northern border are up sevenfold to 190,000 in 2023 but the odds of this topic coming up as an election issue are slim, which is unfortunate because last year, for every one suspected terrorist apprehended at the southern border, there were six arrested at the Canadian border. (564 in total) Legal immigration also may not come up, which is outrageous because Americans have a right to know who the candidates want to let in and how many they’d allow. Trump has a proven track record of being tough on illegal immigration but his views on legal immigration are unclear. In June, he said he’d like to offer green cards to anyone who graduates from a two or four year college—a nutty plan that would turn unselective American colleges into visa mills. And in his 2019 State of the Union address, he said he wanted to bring in the “largest numbers ever” of legal immigrants.
During his administration, Trump also proposed revising America’s legal immigration away from chain, family based migration, which typically accounts for about two-thirds of the immigrant visas issued in any given year, toward a merit based system more similar to what Canada and Australia have. His plan went nowhere but the idea is worth reviving. Ms. Harris opposed merit-based immigration in 2019, arguing that we can’t have “hierarchies among immigrants”. So does that mean that we should treat a high school dropout drug dealer the same as a Stem PhD?
The candidates are unlikely to be asked about non-immigrant visas but that’s a pity because up to half of the illegal population came here legally, most on tourist visas, which are still far too easy for citizens of poor countries to obtain. I suspect that Trump and Harris will quietly offer venal support to companies who want to increase the number of guest workers who arrive on skilled (H1B) and unskilled (H2A-agriculture, H2B- general labor) visas, but they should be asked to explain why more guest workers are needed in a faltering economy.
How will Harris 2.0 try to talk her way out of her hard left immigration positions she’s held in her quite recent past? I suspect some Americans would give her the benefit of the doubt if she admitted that her party’s policies caused the migrant crisis and said she now realizes we must get tougher. But she’s highly unlikely to do that. Instead, she’ll rely on the corrupt media and her own formidable acting skills to obscure her execrable record while hoping Americans are as forgetful as the President.
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