President Joe Biden has been promising to introduce a sweeping immigration overhaul bill in Congress ever since he first launched his campaign. On Thursday, he made good on that promise. Everyone expected that amnesty for millions of illegal aliens would be the centerpiece of the bill, but even many Democrats in Congress and political operatives around the country were taken aback by the sheer audacity of the 353-page bill that would essentially abolish borders and enforcement.
Sure, anyone could have predicted that FAIR was not going to be pleased with the bill. (We’re not, for the record.) But the bill is so laden with the wish-list items of every radical open borders policy group, and every cheap labor interest lobby, that many Democratic lawmakers are acting as though the White House had just dropped a massive stink bomb on them.
“Catastrophic” and “a recipe for disaster,” is how Texas Democratic Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, described the administration’s U.S. Citizenship Act. Fellow Texas Democratic Congressman Henry Cuellar had this to say: “Hey, we don’t want the wall, but when it comes to the other issues, we gotta be careful that we don’t give the impression that we have open borders because otherwise the numbers are going to start going up. And surely enough, we’re starting to see numbers go up.”
The reaction to the bill from many Democrats wasn’t any more positive even in states far away from the southern border. As senior advisor to North Carolina’s Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper cautioned that while the party’s radical wing makes a lot noise and gets a lot of attention, most Democrats have not lost their minds. “Most Democrats will tell you there has to be border security and strengthening as part of any package, and the folks who disagree with that are more of a minority in the party,” stated Morgan Jackson. Not only is border security and strengthening not part of the package, the bill would weaken all aspects of immigration enforcement to a point of irrelevance.
Similar reactions were expressed by Democratic leaders in purple states across the country, such as Michigan, Florida, and Arizona. While folks in Nancy Pelosi’s home district of San Francisco, and hipsters in Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s home borough of Brooklyn may be ecstatic about the Biden immigration bill, it might behoove them to remember that the rest of the country isn’t San Francisco or Brooklyn – at least not yet.
For the sake of their own political fortunes, never mind those of the American public, the president and Democratic congressional leaders may want to join some of these other Democrats in their bomb shelters until this blows over – or turn their attention to addressing COVID, unemployment, crime, and other matters that Americans elected them to deal with.
