Immigration is set to be a major battle in the upcoming 2020 election, and savvy conservatives can use this – along with the Democrats’ extreme open border policies – to help win Congressional elections in swing districts.
A Pew Research Center poll of likely Republican voters found that 65 percent of them call on their party to prioritize the ending of illegal immigration, coupled with efforts to reduce the population of illegal immigrants living in the United States. The reasons for this are varied, but compelling.
Some Americans see mass migration causing an erosion of social cohesion in America, which is inevitable when too many immigrants come here not to assimilate and become part of the American dream, but merely to earn a living, with their wages sent back home to Mexico, or to Central America, instead of being reinvested in local American communities. When you have large unassimilated populations within the country, social cohesion can’t help but erode.
Other Americans look to the current migrant melt-down in Europe, where long-established cultures are being forcibly changed – and not for the better. They see this as something profoundly to be avoided, and they are right.
Some Americans cite the fact that a glut of foreign workers willing to work for minimum wage is stagnating – or even driving down – wages for hard-working Americans. While low wages are great for those looking for low-cost housekeepers or landscapers, this is not good for Americans working for an hourly wage while struggling to raise a family. The law of supply and demand ensures that, when labor is a glut on the market, wages for all hourly workers remain low.
Finally, some Americans are concerned over the cost of providing basic social services to illegal immigrants and their families. Billions of dollars are spent providing people – including people who have no legal right to even be here – with welfare benefits, healthcare benefits (often clogging emergency rooms in hospitals in or near heavily illegal immigrant-populated communities), education for their children and other expensive social services. America’s humanitarian nature means that we will provide services to those in this country – especially to women and children – who desperately need them. The only way to limit the unchecked growth of these expensive services is to limit the population needing them to American citizens and legal residents. Foreigners with no legal right to be here, have no inherent right to demand services from American taxpayers – and if they are not in the US, they have no claim at all.
Whatever their reasons, millions of Americans are concerned about the ongoing implications of open borders and the seemingly-unending tidal wave of illegal immigrants that is flooding our nation. One reason for that failure to close the border – egged on by the mainstream media – is the Democrats’ blatant call of “y’all come” to illegal immigrants.
Democrat strategists know that congressional districts with heavy illegal immigrant populations tend to vote for Dems, which they see as an electoral plus. In addition, looking to a future where either all the illegals will be made citizens – or, where illegals are allowed to vote regardless of citizenship status – those same strategist believe that the vast majority of those illegals would vote unilaterally for the Democrats. They are also pushing for illegals to be counted in the US Census, a tool used to determine the size of Congressional districts. If illegal immigrants are counted, more born-to-vote-Democrat Congressional districts will be created in high-density immigrant communities. This is a subtle, effective way of shifting political power away from American citizens and toward the illegals, even if they can’t actually vote – at least not legally.
As the 2020 campaign moves forward, the leading Democrat Presidential candidates are edging ever further toward the Left, embracing new strategies to normalize current and future illegal alien immigrants. The latest of these unprincipled candidates is Joe Biden, who once again is great at telling a story – but one that isn’t based on reality. Recently, for example, Biden told a town hall in rural South Carolina that he would shut down illegal immigrant shelters and detention facilities at the border.
“Close them down!” he shouted. “We don’t need them. President Obama and I found that, when we were in office, in fact …when we finally got things under control, you have to report back for a hearing on such-and-such a date, people show up!”
In making this preposterous claim, Biden ignored one important fact, and flat-out lied about another. First, Biden ignored the fact that many of the detention facilities and shelters in use today were opened during the Obama administration, created in response to that massive wave of unaccompanied minors that inundated our border during Obama’s term in office. Biden being Biden, he also blatantly lied about illegals showing up for hearings. The Department of Homeland Security’s acting Secretary, Kevin McAleenan recently testified before a Senate oversight committee that, of 7,000 cases of asylum seekers earlier in 2019, “ninety percent did not bother to show up for their court hearings.” Those 90 percent of no-showers instead received final orders of removal in absentia, meaning that because they were no-shows at their hearings, their presumably bogus appeals for asylum were denied.
Instead of pursuing asylum, once they were free inside America, these scofflaws swiftly migrated to heavily illegal immigrant-population communities – usually within sanctuary cities – and disappeared from public view. McAleenan told this Senate hearing that this overwhelming flood-tide of asylum seekers had become a “full-blown emergency,” one the Democrats – and not just Joe Biden – seem eager to exploit.
Both Senators Bernie Sanders (S-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) have climbed onto the “shut down those detention centers” bandwagon, essentially advocating for open borders by stripping America of the ability to detain illegals until their status can be adjudicated. This blatant open border position is increasingly being adopted by other Democrat candidates.
This is, perhaps, the ultimate reason why this potentially divisive issue can be made to work for Conservative Congressional candidates in 2020. Just as an enraged and motivated Conservative majority forced Bush 43 to shy away from his path-to-citizenship “comprehensive immigration reform” initiative in 2007, successful Congressional candidates can and should use the extreme open border position being espoused at the Presidential level as an effective wedge issue to splinter the knee-jerk Democrat coalition, just as President Trump did in Wisconsin and Michigan in 2016.