[Federalist] In the Biden White House, illegal immigration is simply politics: The politics of broader electoral viability, the politics of future voting demographics, the politics of appeasing the base, and most recently, the politics of retribution. This latest phase entered the scene this week, with the administration’s reported plan to force the millions of illegal immigrants streaming over the border to remain in Texas.
But the politics goes back to the beginning when the former vice president was sharing a debate stage with the next generation of Democrat leaders. His old boss had put a boil under the long-simmering issue with his extra-congressional amnesty for "dreamers." President Barack Obama empowered radical immigration activists who would eventually shout him down in his own White House — and push the party’s national slate hard to the left. By the time of the 2020 primaries, Joe Biden alone stood against all of their wildest reforms, including decriminalizing illegal crossings and abolishing Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Though he was old, noticeably slowing down, and had been repeatedly passed over by President Barack Obama and the rest of the poobahs, party leadership knew they needed to play on more centrist positions to compete in the general election. Aged and unwanted would take a backseat to hard power: Joe Biden was their man.
Of course, expanding third-world immigration had long been part of the Democrats’ plan. Decades before Tucker Carlson was excoriated for pointing it out, Ruy Teixeira and John Judis’s smash book, The Emerging Democratic Majority, listed the relative rise of immigrant America as one of the keys to the kingdom. Clinton strategist James Carville’s follow-up, 40 More Years—How Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation, took a sharp point and blunted it into a club. Carville’s thesis, that "Demographic change will keep swelling the Democratic ranks until Republicans have little choice but to surrender," Teixeira lamented in 2020, "is a narrative I know well, for it is based on a bowdlerization of my own work."
By the election of President Donald Trump, Teixeira had grown dismayed with how Democrats had treated his theory, betraying the white working-class voters he believed their coalition still required in the name of newcomers and illegals. |