After visiting a nearby resort filled with opulent wokesters, I couldn’t help but notice the signs proclaiming, “Love, not hate, makes America great.” I suspect the signs were meant to remind us of Donald Trump’s supposed nastiness for deporting as many as 50,000 illegal immigrants — most with criminal records. According to the left, such a policy makes Trump a fascist — maybe even the latest incarnation of Hitler.
A “nicer” leader, we’re told, would allow these illegal immigrants — including convicted rapists and other lowlifes — to remain in the country, at least until they exhausted multiple judicial appeals or committed a few more crimes. Why stop there? Let them vote in local elections, receive public assistance, education, and health care. After all, they supposedly enrich our society — or so Democrats insist, as they work tirelessly to provide all these forms of taxpayer-funded hospitality.
When virtue signalers clutch their pearls over Trump’s treatment of ‘nice illegal rapists,’ I have to wonder if they’re playing dumb.
But why did Democratic presidents we’re supposed to venerate — Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — get a free pass for far harsher deportation records? Clinton expelled close to a million illegal aliens with minimal judicial involvement, even boasting about his deportations during his re-election campaign. Obama, the left’s beloved heartthrob, threw out over four million illegal immigrants, aided by Trump’s current border czar Tom Homan, all without major interference from Democratic-appointed judges.
Compared to Clinton and Obama, Trump’s deportation numbers look paltry, especially given the legal and media warfare waged against him.
Even as recently as 2006, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) — now screaming about Trump’s “cruelty” — eagerly pushed for building a border wall. Thirty years ago, few Democratic senators would have voted against it. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), back then, warned against flooding the country with unskilled foreign labor that would hurt America’s most vulnerable workers. Obama himself praised tougher immigration controls. In 2006, Democrats still held some loyalty to their working-class base. They understood that saturating American communities with third world lumpenproletariat — not to mention foreign gangs — would devastate the working class.
That was before Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Pete Buttigieg, Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), and Rachel Levine became the faces of the rebranded Democratic Party.
Since then, both national parties have swapped electoral bases. Republicans moved away from country-club elites and realigned with the white — and increasingly Hispanic — working class. Democrats abandoned their traditional blue-collar support to embrace progressive white women, the LGBTQ lobby, government bureaucrats, black militants, and now, the cause of illegal immigrants.
For Democrats, the strategy is simple: expand the non-working-class base. Biden’s administration opened the border to as many as 10 million illegal aliens, and anyone with a functioning brain can see why.
Yet, when virtue signalers clutch their pearls over Trump’s treatment of “nice illegal rapists,” I have to wonder if they’re playing dumb. Do they really not know why their party flooded the country with illegal aliens? Do they honestly think slogans about “love” explain why Democrats fight tooth and nail to keep even convicted criminals from deportation?
Every illegal immigrant represents a potential future Democratic voter. If Trump’s administration was allowed to make moral distinctions among the “undocumented,” Democrats might lose too many future loyalists. Better, from their view, to defend even a wife-beating, MS-13-affiliated “Maryland man” than risk losing tomorrow’s votes.
Perhaps I’m being unfair. Maybe the Democratic cheering squad doesn’t know — or care — how radically its party reversed itself on immigration. Maybe leftists assume their Democratic heroes always held the same radical social views as Tim Walz and Hakeem Jeffries.
Most live in the present, parroting whatever slogans the media and party elites hand them. If journalists and historians hide the truth, these activists show little curiosity to uncover it.
Meanwhile, the media and judicial attacks on Trump’s supposedly “Nazi-like” immigration policies continue to erode public support. Trump now polls negatively even on immigration, the very issue that propelled him into the White House.
If this delusion holds, Democrats may succeed in securing nearly all of their future voters.
