Dems Want To Keep The Border Open As An Electoral Strategy

If you want to know where Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democrats stand on the border and immigration, a recent exchange between former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Bill Maher tells the tale.

Pelosi recently told Maher that she supports a California bill that would give illegal immigrants taxpayer money to buy homes. Maher quipped that Democrats didn’t used to support “free housing” for illegal immigrants, and Pelosi replied, “Well, that’s not free housing. It’s the American Dream being available to more people.”

When Maher noted that the California bill would make the American Dream available for the “undocumented,” Pelosi said, “Well, what I would like to do is move them to documented.”

And that, in a nutshell, is the Democrat Party’s view of illegal immigration. They would like to make illegal immigrants who are already living in the United States, legal. The favored policy for making them legal is mass amnesty — with public benefits like taxpayer funding for a new home. This is what Democrats means when they talk about “comprehensive immigration reform.” They mean mass amnesty.

This is Kamala Harris’ view. She has said so explicitly many times. When Harris reiterates her support — as she does every time immigration comes up these day — for the “bipartisan border bill” that was brought forward last year and narrowly defeated by Republicans, she’s signaling that she supports mass illegal immigration with legalization bestowed after the fact. That’s the Democrat position.

And it’s not a new position. Democrats have been talking about mass immigration as a political strategy for decades. They have written entire books about it. A widely-read 2002 book, “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” by Ruy Teixeira and John Judis, argued that a dominant Democratic Party of the future would be a coalition of traditional Democrats like working-class whites, single women, and black Americans, together with a new professional class and, crucially, immigrants.

It hasn’t exactly turned out that way, but for many years it was openly and unashamedly argued among Democrats that the key to future electoral success was importing immigrants in the belief that they would vote Democrat. That belief still lingers on in the Democratic Party, but if you remind anyone of it today you’re accused of propagating a “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory and being a white supremacist. All you have to do is simply take Democrat strategists — and Nancy Pelosi — at their word. They think illegal immigrants, if they’re allowed to stay, will vote Democrat. That’s the reason, in Pelosi’s phrase, they want to “move them to documented.”

That’s also why you see a push in deep blue states to let illegal immigrants vote in local and state elections, and why many Democrat-run states are making it easy for noncitizens to register to vote. The unserious argument Democrats offer in reply to those who object on grounds of election integrity is that illegal immigrants won’t vote in federal elections because it’s illegal — as if declaring clandestine border-crossing to be illegal would finally secure the border.

Understand, too, that the belief that newly arrived foreigners will eventually be Democrat voters is manifesting itself on the border right now. Mexico just announced it will escort busloads of migrants from southern Mexico to the U.S.-Mexico border if they have been approved for asylum by the U.S. Why would they be approved for asylum in southern Mexico, so far from the U.S. border? Because the Biden-Harris administration has been working to expand access to its CBP One app, which previously had been restricted to central and northern Mexico.

In other words, the government of Mexico is responding to the policies of the Biden-Harris administration by taking concrete steps to facilitate the movement of migrants, whom Mexico doesn’t want in its territory, north to the U.S. border. Busloads of migrants will travel under armed escort through Mexico, with free meals provided, which will add to the number of people crossing the border and claiming asylum (which, it’s worth noting, very few of them ever get).

All of this is to reiterate that yes, Democrats favor mass illegal immigration because they believe it’s a strategy for electoral victory. They have thought so for decades, so let’s not be surprised when in unguarded moments they come right out and admit it, as Nancy Pelosi just did.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.