Andrew Sullivan: ‘No Democrat’ Has Immigration Policy to Beat Trump

Border 'emergency': the problem Trump can't fix
AFP
Neil Munro

Democrats “are on the wrong side of the immigration argument, the core issue shaping Western politics,” says Andrew Sullivan, a moderate-minded liberal writer at New York magazine.

Sullivan is a gay liberal who led the push for single-sex marriage. But he is not an anti-America progressive. He has supported the border wall and recognizes the political extremism of the Democrats’ see-no-problem policies towards immigration:

My own view is that the only Democrat who will beat Trump next year will campaign for control of immigration, legal and undocumented, in a sane and humane way. The issue will be dominant again — because of a huge wave of migrants, many of them rural Guatemalans, who are overwhelming the border, trying to enter the U.S. at a current pace of 100,000 a month. Their ability to claim asylum under current law permits them to show up at the border, get admitted and processed by the Border Patrol, and then released into the interior, to reside here until a court date, which could come up years later. The backlog in the underfunded immigration courts is vast, with more than a million still in line for a hearing. Many of the migrants won’t show up for the court date; those who do can still resist deportation indefinitely.

What this means is that the U.S. now has an effectively open border with Mexico, and, according to the American Bar Association, the immigration system is “irredeemably dysfunctional and on the brink of collapse.” Repeating the Democratic mantra that there is no border crisis will not work for much longer. This year will see more undocumented immigrants than in any year under Obama. And the high rate of success among those trying to enter to the country now encourages more migrants to make the journey, especially given the forces of disorder and climate change that are forcing people to flee. The lesson from Europe in 2015 is that a migrant surge fuels itself, as word gets back home. And then white nationalism takes off.

We could, in other words, be in the mother of all immigration scares as the first primaries take place. We could have a million more migrants to grapple with. Currently, no Democrat has any response to this. The only candidate with an actual immigration policy, Julián Castro, favors a much more lenient system and an end to criminalizing illegal border crossing. He wants the immigration surge to become a flood, all but guaranteeing Trump’s reelection.

Sullivan uses his warning to the Democrat Party to tout Pete Buttigieg, who is a progressive and gay mayor of South Bend, Indiana:

If Buttigieg counters with a campaign for a path to citizenship for most here, but also in favor of mandatory e-verify (a completely humane way to enforce immigration law in the interior of the country via employment), he’d break out of the pack. Just actively treating the fears about immigration as legitimate — and seeking to assuage them — would mark him as a different kind of Democrat.

Sullivan is a bourgeois gay, and wants gay people to become an indistinguishable part of normal society. For Sullivan, gay equality means that politics for gay people becomes just humdrum, normal politics — crime and traffic, wages and migration, healthcare laws, and Social Security debates.

But Buttigieg is a gay, big-government progressive, so his supporters, alliances, commitments, and politics all tend towards the progressive, no-borders left, despite his moderate demeanor and his professed Christianity.

For example, on the April 7 Meet the Press show, Chuck Todd asked Buttigieg about his immigration policies. Buttigieg answered by saying that illegals should be protected because they are part of U.S. communities:

So we have worked very hard to be a welcoming city because the current immigration policies are just wrong. People who are really important parts of our community are being torn apart from their families. And this is not making us safer. It is not making us stronger. Now, when it comes to ICE, I don’t care what the agency in charge of our immigration and border enforcement is called. I care what it does. And as long as you have an agency, even if you get rid of ICE and called it something else, being ordered to tear families apart from one another or being ordered to make it harder to get on a path to citizenship, you’re going to continue to have heartbreaking stories that are not helping anybody. Whether we’re talking about the undocumented immigrants concerned or whether you’re talking about the communities that they’re a part of.

That is a diplomatic way of saying that illegals will be allowed to stay in the United States once they get past the border. That is also the Democrats’ usual “We’re-not-for-deportations” disguised endorsement of open borders.

This is also the backway way progressives say Americans are not allowed to build their own communities, not to protect their communities from foreign migrants who lower their wages, crowd into their children’s blue-collar schools, and fuel the divisive diversity which helps progressives grab power in fractured societies.

Buttigieg’s progressivism also pressures him to oppose the clear biological distinctions between men and women, and thus he talks up the transgender ideology.

In an April 7 fundraiser for a gay advocacy group, Buttigieg suggested the Pentagon should accept the core transgender demand that people’s legal sex be determined by their sense of “gender identity,” not by their actual genes and male-or-female body. He said:

The struggle is not over when transgender troops, ready to put their lives on the line for this country, have their careers threatened with ruin one tweet at a time by a commander in chief who himself pretended to be disabled in order to get out of serving when it was his turn.

If the Pentagon is forced to accept the claim that gender (not the bright line of biology) decides a person’s male or female sex, then progressives will have won a huge victory in their campaign to erase the public’s immense variety of helpful civic practices and laws which help men and women manage their competitive and cooperatives lives together. Those non-government rules — marriage, dating, sports leagues, privacy, and much else — are based on the recognition that women and men are legally equal and also different and complementary.

In contrast, most progressives believe that men and women are indistinguishable and interchangeable, and so only a few are able to publicly oppose the transgender ideology or the globalist, open-borders push.

Sullivan’s liberalism allows him to recognize the reality of biology and sex — and of nations and borders — but it does not allow progressives to become liberal moderates.

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