What Biden Doesn’t Get On Immigration – The Weekly Dish
One of my deepest concerns about Trump as president was that he was fundamentally distorting our field of political vision. By creating a caricature of some of the worst elements of the right, he intensified a stark polarization that actually empowered the extreme left in America, and helped its takeover of all our cultural institutions.
The most successful politicians in my lifetime Reagan and Thatcher shifted their opposition toward their own agenda, bestowing us with Clinton and Blair. In contrast, Trump actually helped radicalize the Democrats as they swung, for understandable reasons, to the equal and opposite positions to his.
On immigration, for example, Trump s legislative incompetence, penchant for cruelty, and bristling xenophobia made the inverse position humane, welcoming, internationalist and permissive much more appealing. And so, in the Democratic primaries, the candidates vied with each other to decriminalize border crossing, end deportations, take down the wall, and abandon enforcement away from the border. Even the alleged centrist, Biden, regretted the policies he had supported under Obama. And Democrats consoled themselves by pointing to opinion polls.
And for admirable reasons, many voters did indeed side with them. And why not? When you seem to have an aggressively anti-illegal-immigration president, and you see images of kids in cages, and an epidemic shuts down the border anyway, these views have an abstract appeal. You tend not to see or not want to see the unavoidable and intrinsically cruel trade-offs that all immigration enforcement brings with it. Or the wider, global context that makes them inevitable.