While Congress’s recent $4.6 billion humanitarian aid package falls well short of addressing America’s border crisis, Democratic presidential aspirants are demonstrating how far they will go to undermine security, sovereignty and the rule of law.
When, at a recent debate, Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., was asked about deporting people who are in the U.S. illegally but have committed no other offense, she reflexively responded: “Absolutely not, they should not be deported.”
Not a single candidate contradicted her. Joe Biden, Barack Obama’s vice president, even refused to defend that administration’s deportation of a record 419,384 illegal aliens in 2012.
At that point, Peter Schuck, an emeritus professor of law at Yale University and a longtime liberal, declared that Democratic leaders had committed “political suicide” (a diagnosis also rendered by conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan).
“A different answer should have been a no-brainer: ‘Yes, [deport them]unless they have a valid asylum claim or some other special claim to remain,'” Schuck wrote in the Los Angeles Times.
“Americans are justly proud of our immigrant past and present — and almost every politician, Democrat or Republican, duly pays lip service to this truth. All but a handful of Americans strongly believe in maintaining our national sovereignty. By categorically and emphatically rejecting the deportation of any noncriminal undocumented person who manages to get inside the country, Harris and fellow Democrats threaten this sovereignty at its core,” Schuck concluded.
FAIR noted earlier this month that the increasingly radical positions of leading Democrats are starting to worry a lot of Democrats. Indeed, the latest polling shows that immigration is the No. 1 concern for voters, and it’s not because this country doesn’t have enough illegal aliens.
“For the last few years health care, a Democratic issue, has been the most important issue, but as the full nature of the problems at the border became evident, it has risen to the top issue in the country,” reported Mark Penn, co-director of the Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll.
Undaunted, the Democratic presidential herd is angling to conflate the two concerns — now arguing that illegal aliens should be entitled to federal medical insurance benefits.
In fact, illegal aliens already receive government-funded health services to the tune of more than $29.2 billion a year, according to FAIR research. But no one on the Democratic stage bothered to mention that. Nor did anyone hazard a guess as to how much more their plans would cost American taxpayers.
One thing is certain: It will never be enough for reckless politicians determined to take themselves and this country over a cliff.