Pirate's Cove

Well, now, this is a real shame. Who would have thought that painting illegal immigration with the rule of law would resonate with American citizens, and would make Democrats look bad?

Top liberal think tanks says Trump’s ‘rule of law’ message on immigration is winning

A top liberal think tank has warned that President Trump’s immigration message is actually winning among most voters and makes Democrats appear weak on enforcement.

The Center for American Progress has released a new report arguing that as Democrats drifted away from the “rule of law” message, it allowed Republicans to rebrand their party as the sole party of rule of law.

This created “the false dichotomy of America as either a nation of immigrants or a nation of laws” that then makes Democrats seem weak on enforcing the nation’s laws, according to the Daily Beast that first obtained the report.

Tom Jawetz, vice president of immigration policy at the think tank, added that those supporting humane immigration policy “have ceded powerful rhetorical ground to immigration restrictionists, who are happy to masquerade as the sole defenders of America as a nation of laws.”

Obviously, the hardcore leftist CAP has to put a spin on the reality of the situation, but, I’d expect nothing less.

Democratic 2020 presidential candidates, meanwhile, have been struggling to find an effective message that counter Trump’s rhetoric and without appearing as embracing extreme policies.

But according to the report, radical proposals such as nationwide amnesty or the abolition of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) only “fuels louder calls for maximum enforcement, which then strengthen calls for abolition, ad infinitum.”

Those calls from Democrats for Open Borders also makes it impossible to even consider working on any type of fix, especially one that includes some sort of pathway to legalization, because we know what Democrats want. The old “give them an inch they’ll take a mile” is in play, and they’ve hit those miles already for what they want.

Over to that Daily Beast article we read

Jawetz—a former immigration attorney and chief counsel on the Immigration Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee, differentiates “the rule of law” and Trump’s “law and order” rhetoric, calling the latter “an enforcement-heavy vision of social control that is generally used as a racially coded dog whistle.” For Democrats to achieve a fair and functional immigration system, they have to patch the immigration system’s fragmented legal framework, Jawetz writes—instead of “relying increasingly upon administrative discretion to save the system from itself.”

Everything is raaaaacist with these folks. Also, calling for Open Borders isn’t exactly patching anything. But, wait, wait, we can’t actually have the rule of law itself, per the opening of the the report.

…The fundamental problem with this debate is that America is, and has always been, both a nation of immigrants and a nation of laws. Debates over a liberal immigration policy actually predate the start of the nation itself; they infused the drafting of the U.S. Constitution, America’s founding document.⁶

Indeed, it is precisely because these two visions of the country are intertwined that America cannot be a nation of laws if those laws are antithetical to its history and ideals as a nation of immigrants. Put another way, the U.S. immigration system can, and must, recognize both the need for movement and the need for defined borders; it must have clear guidelines but also clear guardrails; and it must live up to the best of the nation’s past while working for its present and future.

Democrat candidates for office and those in already pay great attention to CAP, and they will be reading this, which essentially lays out a path for Open Borders while telling politicians to lie about it.