• return2ozma@lemmy.worldOP
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    3 months ago

    Please read the article before doing a knee jerk reaction to the headline.

    Over the past year in particular, Democrats have abandoned the positive arguments for immigration and its benefits and contributions to American life that were standard for both the party and American tradition — a positive vision that was politically successful for them during the Trump years. Instead, they have taken the cowardly option of trying to outdo Republicans over who can be harsher immigration hawks.

    Since this is a game Democrats can never win — there is virtually no inhumane policy they could adopt or carry out that will make voters view Republicans as softer on immigration — they have received no discernible political benefit from this. Which, of course, hasn’t changed their thinking an iota.

    So now we have the Kamala Harris campaign not just constantly touting a terrible immigration bill and its legally dubious ending of the right to asylum, but even promising to build Trump’s border wall, for years the physical symbol of the cruelty, racism, and stupidity of Trump’s immigration agenda. The Democrats’ promise to clamp down on asylum seekers, incidentally, would negatively affect at least some of the same Haitian migrants in Springfield whom Republicans are inciting violence against.

    As we’ve seen so many times in American politics, the appalling behavior of the Right gives the liberal center a largely free pass on its own misdeeds.