Right On: Trump implements Democratic immigration policies

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OPINION — Donald Trump, closet Democrat.

He certainly was accused of being one by his opponents in the 2016 presidential primaries. After all, he’d been a registered Democrat from 2001 to 2009. As if to confirm their fears, Trump now is implementing Obama-era Democratic immigration policies.

Yet Democrats are hyperventilating. To hear them tell it, you’d think he just came back from a Ku Klux Klan cross burning.

Democrats have always seen themselves as champions of the little guy. But Democratic Party policy priorities have changed over the last decade, shifting ever leftward.

They’ve given up appealing to the working class and have decided instead that more votes lie in championing immigrants, especially illegal ones.

Let’s review what Trump is doing and compare today’s Democrats with those of the recent past. Start with Trump’s latest outrage: calling for National Guard troops to protect our border.

Democratic Rep. Joaquin Castro said recently, “We don’t need to turn our border communities into militarized zones.” He was joined by Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego who declared that the armed forces should not “stand guard against dangers that exist only in President Trump’s fevered imagination.”

Presidents Bush and Obama apparently suffered from the same malady.

From the Washington Post in May 2010: “President Obama will deploy 1,200 National Guard troops and request an extra $500 million to secure the Mexican border. The initiative echoes 2006’s Operation Jump Start, in which President George W. Bush devoted 6,000 guardsmen to a two-year commitment in support of the Border Patrol.”

“Fevered imaginations” must be endemic to the White House.

How about Trump’s racist plan to ask 2020 census respondents if they are citizens?

New York Attorney General Democrat Eric Schneiderman is leading like-minded Democratic state attorneys general in suing the Trump administration over the question. They claim that knowing the question is in the census will cause Hispanics, both legal and illegal, to avoid census takers.

Today’s Democrats assert the result will be undercounting, leading to reduced representation in Congress. They say any fool can see it’s being done to punish states like New York and California that welcome immigrants.

Could it be that suing the Trump administration is really more about their political careers? Schneiderman plans to run for governor.

This vast right-wing conspiracy to undercount immigrants was hatched under President Bill Clinton. Somehow Republicans must have slipped Question 13 asking about citizenship status into the 2000 census when Clinton’s Census Bureau director wasn’t looking.

Astonishingly, the conspiracy continued to flourish under the Obama administration. From 2010 to 2017, all eight annual Census Bureau American Community Surveys asked for place of birth, citizenship and year of entry.

Why would Obama do that? His ACS website explains, “To better understand the composition of our nation’s changing population.”

It’s going to be tough to win the lawsuit.

But hasn’t Trump abandoned the “Dreamers,” young children brought here by illegal immigrant parents? They know no other country and Trump wants to deport them all, right?

Obama’s “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals” order was halfhearted when compared to what Trump offered Democrats.

Obama offered no path to citizenship for 800,000 Dreamers, offering only to defer deportation. Trump offered a path to citizenship for 1.6 million Dreamers coupled with other changes to the nation’s immigration policies supported by Democrats in years past.

Turning a blind eye to the party’s past positions, Rep. Nancy Pelosi called Trump’s plan “a hateful anti-immigrant scheme” and part of Trump’s conspiracy “to make America white again.”

Democrats would rather keep the Dreamers in limbo so they can use them as vote-getting pawns while railing against “racist” Republicans.

How could I have left Trump’s border wall until the end? We all know he wants it because he hates Hispanics.

Omar Jadwat of the ACLU says, “President Trump’s fantasy of sealing the border with a wall is driven by racial and ethnic bias that disgraces America’s proud tradition of protecting vulnerable migrants.”

If that is true – and it demonstrably isn’t – there are plenty of bigoted Democrats in his camp.

Then-senators Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer supported the Secure Fence Act of 2006 along with 23 other Democrats. Obama stated the fence would provide “better security along our borders” and “help stem some of the tide of illegal immigration in this country.”

The Senate approved the law, 80 to 19 and President G. W. Bush signed it.

Do Democrats expect us to believe that a fence “improves border security” while a wall shows “racial and ethnic bias?” Give me a break.

Democratic politics dictate resisting anything Trump does, even at the cost of throwing Dreamers under the bus and keeping socially-divisive identity politics alive and well. All because Democrats have fond hopes of a congressional majority in 2018 and a Democratic president in 2020.

All’s fair in love and war. And in Democratic politics.

Howard Sierer is an opinion columnist for St. George News. The opinions stated in this article are his own and may not be representative of St. George News.

Email: [email protected]

Twitter: @STGnews

Copyright St. George News, SaintGeorgeUtah.com LLC, 2018, all rights reserved.

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4 Comments

  • Real Life May 3, 2018 at 3:47 pm

    A much more accurate portrayal of the situation than our friend Ed Koaciela has presented.

  • commonsense May 3, 2018 at 8:43 pm

    The thing that drives all Liberal politics is a greed for power. Say anything that may attract votes at the time, then change if the wind blows. There are no absolutes. If you need votes then you become pro immigrant. Obama thought he didn’t need the immigrants but things changed. Now, the Dems will take whatever they can get.

    • comments May 3, 2018 at 9:42 pm

      And the republicans are all angels, of course. Man, you are are the most ignorant person. Do we even have any genuine conservatives in gov’t or do you just think the neocon globalists and RINOs are the best thing ever? smh

  • utahdiablo May 3, 2018 at 9:48 pm

    Call it whatever the hell you want to…just get these damn illegals the hell out of the USA

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