“You Know, The United States Needs More Of This”: In The Race To The Bottom On Immigration, Walker Makes His Move
Over the weekend, Donald Trump became the first Republican presidential candidate to unveil an actual immigration plan. It wasn’t quite what reform proponents were hoping for – Trump’s vision includes mass deportations for roughly 11 million people, a Mexican-built wall, ignoring provisions of the 14th Amendment, and quite possibly deporting U.S. citizens.
If there’s a race to the bottom underway among Republicans battling for anti-immigrant voters, it was a fairly bold move. As Bloomberg Politics reported yesterday, it left one of Trump’s top rivals scrambling to tell conservatives how similar his plan is to the leading GOP candidate.
Republican presidential candidate Scott Walker said Monday his immigration plan is “very similar” to the policy blueprint released Sunday by Donald Trump which amounts to a comprehensive attack on legal and illegal immigration.
“I haven’t looked at all the details of his but the things I’ve heard are very similar to the things I’ve mentioned,” the Wisconsin governor said on Fox & Friends.
Yes, we’ve reached the curious stage of the 2016 cycle at which prominent Republicans boast about how in sync they are with Donald Trump. Last week, it was Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.). Yesterday, it was Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R).
As viewers of last night’s show know, the degree to which Trump is actually influencing the direction of Republican politics is increasingly difficult to ignore. Sure, that’s to be expected by a White House candidate who’s dominating the race, but given Trump’s clownish reputation, it’s nevertheless striking to see the dynamic unfold before our eyes.
As for the far-right governor, as the day progressed, Walker’s approach to immigration came into sharper focus. He still doesn’t have a detailed plan, per se, but he’s offering more than just “I’m like Trump” on this key issue.
For example, Walker is now the latest national Republican candidate to oppose birthright citizenship – more on this point later today – and he’s on board with mass deportations. So how is this different from Trump? BuzzFeed noted that the Wisconsin governor is eyeing a very different model as a source for inspiration.
Walker repeated his call for a border fence between the U.S. and Mexico on Monday similar to the one separating Israel from Palestinian territories in the West Bank. […]
“I was in Israel earlier this year, they built a 500-mile fence and they have it stacked and it’s lowered terrorist attacks in that region by about 90-plus percent. We need to do the same along our border, we’ve obviously got a bigger border, about four times that, but we’re a country that should be able to hold that,” Walker said while speaking on the Des Moines Register soapbox at the Iowa State Fair.
Let’s not brush past Walker’s point of comparison too quickly. Who looks at the barriers separating Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank and thinks, “You know, the United States needs more of this”?
As for the broader debate, 2012 exit polls suggest Mitt “Self-Deportation” Romney won about 27% of the Latino vote in the last presidential election. Driven by a rabid GOP base, the current crop of Republican candidates seems determined to fare considerably worse in 2016.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 18, 2015
“Let ‘The Good Ones’ Return”: Why Donald Trump Is The Only GOP Presidential Hopeful Who Can Talk Straight On Immigration
Four years ago, deep within a process of convincing Republican primary voters that he was “severely conservative,” Mitt Romney declared that his solution for dealing with the millions of undocumented immigrants in the United States was “self-deportation” — in other words, making life so miserable for them that they’d prefer to return to the countries they fled from rather than stay here. The chairman of the Republican Party later called Romney’s words “horrific,” not so much out of some moral revulsion, but because they sent a clear message of hostility to Hispanic voters, the country’s largest minority group and one that is growing fast. Since then, most Republicans have acknowledged that they have to be careful about how they talk about those 11 million immigrants if they want to have any hope of winning the White House again.
Then along came Donald Trump, who isn’t careful about anything (other than that glorious and extremely delicate mane of hair). Barreling into the campaign, Trump said he’d deport all 11 million, then let “the good ones” return to the United States. How would the unfathomably complicated task of locating all those people, detaining them, and moving them back to their countries of origin be accomplished? “It’s feasible if you know how to manage,” he said. OK then.
Compared to Trump, the rest of the GOP candidates have been models of reason and thoughtfulness on this issue, and between them they’ve taken a couple of different positions on how to handle the undocumented. If comprehensive immigration reform ever happens, this will be one of its key components, so it’s important to know where they stand.
But first, what about the public? Gallup just released a survey that sheds some light on this question, showing both why Trump is getting support and why most of the other candidates are taking a different tack. Asked whether the government should “deport all illegal immigrants back to their home country, allow illegal immigrants to remain in the United States in order to work, but only for a limited amount of time, or allow illegal immigrants to remain in the United States and become U.S. citizens, but only if they meet certain requirements over a period of time,” a full 65 percent said they should be allowed to become citizens, and only 19 percent said they should be deported.
But right now, the GOP candidates aren’t seeking the support of the whole country, they’re going after the Republicans who might vote in upcoming primaries. Among Republicans, the numbers are different — but not as much as you might expect. Fifty percent of Republicans said there should be a path to citizenship, while 31 percent said they should be deported.
Thirty-one percent isn’t a majority, but it’s still a lot — and you could say the same about Trump’s support in the polls. Right now he’s averaging around 24 percent, and while there are certainly people supporting him who don’t agree with him on immigration (and those opposing him who do), if you want the candidate taking the clearest anti-immigrant stance, your choice is pretty clear.
So where do the other candidates come down? When you ask them about a path to citizenship you’ll inevitably get a complicated answer, but most of them say one of two things: either they support a path to citizenship, or they support a path to some other kind of legal status, but not citizenship itself.
Interestingly enough, among the candidates who take the latter position — the more conservative one — are the son of a Cuban immigrant and the husband of a Mexican immigrant. Ted Cruz may be the farthest to the right (other than Trump) — he spends a lot of time decrying “amnesty” — but if pressed will say that he’s open to some kind of restrictive work permit that would allow undocumented immigrants to stay in the country. Jeb Bush talks about a “path to legal status,” but pointedly says that the path does not end in citizenship, but rather in something that resembles a green card, allowing the immigrant to work and live in the U.S., but not be an American citizen. (Bush used to support a path to citizenship, but not anymore.)
Others have taken the same position. Carly Fiorina says that some legal status might be acceptable, but not citizenship. Rick Santorum not only opposes a path to citizenship, but wants to drastically curtail legal immigration as well. Chris Christie used to support a path to citizenship, but has since changed his mind. Rick Perry is also opposed to a path to citizenship, but doesn’t seem to have answered a specific question about the undocumented in some time.
Whenever any of them describes their path, whether to citizenship or some kind of guest worker status, it contains some key features. It winds over many years, involves paying fines and any back taxes, and also involves proving that the immigrant speaks English. The truth is that this last provision is completely unnecessary — this wave of immigrants is learning English no slower than previous waves did — but it’s actually an important way for voters with complex feelings about immigration to feel less threatened and be reassured that the immigrants will become American.
For most of the candidates, the end of the long process is indeed citizenship. Scott Walker, after a bunch of incoherent and seemingly contradictory statements, finally said that he could eventually foresee a path to citizenship, once the border is secure (more on that in a moment). Marco Rubio will describe for you an intricate process that ends in citizenship, even if he seems reluctant to say so (Rubio was essentially cast out of the Tea Party temple after he proposed a comprehensive reform bill, which he has since dropped). Rand Paul has essentially the same position — he describes a path to citizenship, but doesn’t like using the word. Bobby Jindal also supports a path to citizenship, as does Mike Huckabee, and John Kasich, and George Pataki, and Lindsey Graham, who has even said that he would veto any immigration reform bill that didn’t contain a path to citizenship for the undocumented. Ben Carson has been vague on the subject, and as far as I can tell no one has asked Jim Gilmore.
But don’t get the idea that any of these candidates are all that eager to move undocumented immigrants down that path too quickly. All of them say we need to “secure the border” before we even begin talking about how undocumented immigrants might eventually become citizens. And they seldom elaborate on what “securing” the border would mean. Would it mean not a single person could sneak over? If not, then what? In practice, they could always say that we can’t get started on laying that path to citizenship because the border is not yet secure.
What all this makes clear is that you have to pay very close attention to understand what most of the candidates actually want to do, and even then you might not be completely sure. And even if there are plenty of Republican voters who would like to see a path to citizenship, at this point their voices are far quieter than the ones complaining about the invading horde. So if a Republican gets elected next fall, I wouldn’t expect him to be in too much of a hurry to create a way for undocumented immigrants to eventually become Americans under the law.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Week, August 17, 2015
“Speaking To Our Anxieties”: The Pissed-Off Primary; Bernie Sanders Vs. Donald Trump
Apart from surprising popularity, weird hair, and zero chance at actually becoming president, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders could hardly seem more different. One’s a socialist-hating billionaire and the other is a billionaire-hating socialist, right? Yet there they are, delivering boffo poll numbers long after everyone in the smart set had written them off as flashes in the pan.
Perhaps, like Austin Powers and Dr. Evil, they’re not so different after all. Indeed, the unanticipated appeal of Trump and Sanders to Republican and Democratic primary voters comes from the same psychological wellspring. They represent, in the words of Pittsburgh Tribune-Review columnist Salena Zito, “populism born of frustration.” They are angry candidates, bitching and moaning about the sorry shape of the United States and they are unabashedly protectionist. Each identifies immigrants and overseas competition as the root cause of most if not all of our problems. They both believe that if only we can wall off the country—literally in The Donald’s case and figuratively in Sanders’—we could “Make America Great Again!” (as Trump puts it in his campaign slogan).
Trump notoriously looks at Mexicans sneaking across the border and sees crime lords, drug dealers, and rapists, though he has magnamiously granted that “some, I assume, are good people.” Sanders, for his part, looks at the same hard cases and sees a reserve army of future wages slaves for the Koch brothers.
In an interview with Vox, Sanders was asked what he thought about increasing immigration in order to help poor foreigners increase their standard of living. “That’s a Koch brothers proposal,” he huffed, “That’s a right-wing proposal, which says essentially there is no United States.” So much for the internationalism and universal brotherhood on which socialism once prided itself.
Being anti-immigrant isn’t a new position for Sanders. As Politico noted earlier this year, Sanders’s loyalty to the AFL-CIO and other labor unions undergirds his consistent opposition to opening up borders and his contempt for free-trade agreements.
In regularly complaining about China, Sanders sounds just like…Donald Trump. Riffing in post-industrial Michigan on August 11, Trump noted China’s currency devaluation and announced, “Devalue means, suck the blood out of the United States!”
For good measure, Trump also attacked Sanders as a weakling even as he saluted him as a brother in spirit. Commenting on how the Vermont senator lost the microphone to Black Lives Matter activist at a recent event in Seattle, Trump said, “I felt badly for him, but it showed that he was weak. You know what? He’s getting the biggest crowds, and we’re getting the biggest crowds. We’re the ones getting the crowds.”
Indeed, they are. Even after gracelessly implying Fox News moderator Megyn Kelly suffered from PMS during the first Republican candidates’ debate, Trump leads among GOP voters with 23 percent and Sanders has “surged” ahead of Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire polls.
Despite this, there’s no chance either will win his party’s nomination, much less become president. As Jack Shafer has noted, they are less candidates and more demagogues, who trade in “anger and resentment to attract supporters.” Such intensity can get you a hard-core band of supporters—just ask George Wallace or Ross Perot—but it also ultimately limits the broad-based support necessary to pull enough votes even in hotly contested three-way elections.
Which isn’t to say that Trump and Sanders haven’t already had a major impact. In the early stages of the campaign, they are tapping into immense voter dissatisfaction with not just the Republican and Democratic Party establishments but a 21st-century status quo that is in many ways genuinely depressing and disappointing. Trump and Sanders offer seemingly authentic responses to and truly simplistic solutions for what ails us. Close the borders! Fuck the Chinese!
What’s most worrisome is that other candidates who are more likely to actually succeed in 2016 will try to win over Trump’s or Sanders’s supporters by co-opting their Fortress America mentality. All of the GOP contenders except Jeb Bush have called for some type of impenetrable border with Mexico as a precondition for discussing any changes in immigration numbers. By and large, they have also signed on to mandatory use of E-Verify, a national database that would effectively turn work into a government-granted privilege while increasing the reach of the surveillance state.
Though she pushed for President Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal while secretary of state, Hillary Clinton has flip-flopped and now is a critic of the deal. If Sanders continues to eat her lunch or even nibble around its edges through the end of the year, look for her to rethink her generally positive position on immigration too.
Trump’s and Sanders’s appeal isn’t hard to dope out.Twice as many of us—60 percent—think the country is headed in the wrong direction as think it’s going in the right direction. Trust in government has been skidding since the 1960s and the general loss of faith has accelerated since the 9/11 attacks. Trump and Sanders speak to our anxieties with a mix of shouty slogans, moral certitude, and magical policies on everything from health care to the minimum wage to ISIS.
In the current moment, it’s the billionaire and the socialist who feel our pain. But if their Republican and Democratic opponents adopt their xenophobia and protectionist ideas, they will have helped increase our pain long after they’ve inevitability sunk in the polls.
By: Nick Gillespie, The Daily Beast, August 13, 2015
“Is Bernie Sanders Actually Too Conservative For The Democratic Party?”: It’s How You Conceptualize The Government’s Obligations
It should be easy for Bernie Sanders to get to the left of Hillary Clinton. The Clintons have long dabbled in centrist Democratic Leadership Council politics, while Sanders is an avowed socialist, albeit a small-d democratic one.
As such, it’s no surprise that Friends of the Earth, a major environmental group, has endorsed Sanders for president in response to Clinton’s dithering over the Keystone XL pipeline. Leaders of large labor unions like the AFL-CIO admit that Sanders is generating more enthusiasm from the rank and file. Sanders is polling competitively in New Hampshire and drawing huge crowds elsewhere, all while raising $15 million from small donors.
Yet it was Sanders the socialist who was effectively heckled by Black Lives Matter activists at the Netroots Nation conference last month. Clinton didn’t attend the progressive confab, but she picked up on Sanders’ unease, and has since incorporated the racial-justice phrase into her speeches.
After Netroots, Sanders again faced a great deal of pushback from the left when he told Ezra Klein that he wasn’t a fan of open borders. “You know what youth unemployment is in the United States of America today?” Sanders asked incredulously. “If you’re a white high school graduate, it’s 33 percent, Hispanic 36 percent, African American 51 percent. You think we should open the borders and bring in a lot of low-wage workers, or do you think maybe we should try to get jobs for those kids?”
There was a time when this wouldn’t have been such a heretical viewpoint on the left. But that time has come and gone. These days, it’s hard to find a liberal this side of Mickey Kaus who thinks restricting immigration for the benefit of American workers is something progressives should contemplate. Some went so far as to argue Sanders’ opposition to open borders was “ugly” and “wrongheaded,” since “no single policy the United States could adopt” would “do more good for more people.” It didn’t take long for Sanders to backtrack slightly, telling Univison’s Jorge Ramos he’d consider opening borders between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.
Kaus, our lonely liberal immigration skeptic, asked what happened to Sanders’ concern about American wages: “Do unskilled Mexicans have some magical properties that suspend supply and demand that unskilled immigrants from other countries lack?”
Sanders defended his immigration views when speaking to the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. He acknowledged that his history representing a 95 percent white state may make minorities worry he is out of touch with their concerns. But that’s only part of Sanders’ problem.
Bernie Sanders is an old-school progressive who believes most of the country’s problems can be traced to class and economics. Meanwhile, contemporary progressivism is more committed to multiculturalism and the idea that America’s biggest injustices remain inextricably tied to race.
On a lot of substantive policy issues, this is a distinction without a difference. Most liberals recognize there is a strong relationship between economics and structural racism. Sanders favors most of the same policies his multicultural critics do and is even, on balance, pretty supportive of high levels of immigration.
But there are important differences rhetorically and in terms of how you conceptualize the government’s obligations. You don’t have to believe Sanders has anything in common with Joseph Stalin’s politics to recognize that he is also talking about “socialism in one country.”
Sanders favors a robust welfare state and wants the government to mandate generous wages and working conditions. But he wants those things for Americans, not necessarily all the people living all across the globe whose standard of living could theoretically be improved by residing in America instead. (Rand Paul gets similar grief when he occasionally advocates libertarianism in one country.)
This puts Sanders out of step with much of his party. It also gives Clinton an opening to Sanders’ left, at least rhetorically, on some racial issues, which could limit his following to college-educated liberal whites. This is crucial, because the ability to reach beyond these voters and win over minorities was the difference between Barack Obama and Howard Dean.
Unless Sanders can, at 73, update his socialism to fit in with the priorities and demands of today’s left, Clinton can keep him contained — and Joe Biden can keep his faint presidential hopes alive.
By: W. James Antle, III, The Week, August 4, 2015
“A Lot Like The Candidate Himself”: Inside The Mind Of A Trump Donor: ‘I Was Probably Drunk’
You learn a few things, calling the 63 individuals who donated more than $250 to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign—helping him pull in a total of $96,000 in the 29 days since his June 16 announcement, according to the financial disclosure he released Wednesday evening.
You learn, for instance, that President Obama, who is an African-born Muslim, wouldn’t help you if you were kidnapped in Iran, that not all undocumented Mexican immigrants are rapists but many of them may be, that it’s unfair to expect billionaires to use their own money to run for office when less wealthy candidates aren’t expected to, and that the willingness to file for bankruptcy multiple times is a sign of a great businessman. But what you learn, most of all, is that the characters propelling America’s greatest political curiosity upward in the polls are a lot like the man himself.
The day started with Francine Aton, 62, Michigan, retired.
“You work for The Daily Beast—which is a more left-wing web-magazine,” she began. “I don’t want something to come out that’s slanted.”
Aton, who said she has a degree in journalism, has little patience for reporters and detects liberal bias in the most innocuous of statements.
Asked why she supports Trump (to the tune of $250), she said, “Because he speaks the truth, he’s honest, and he can’t be bought.” So she likes him, I said, because he’s wealthy and that means—“Listen to how you just slanted that question!” she cut me off. “Is Hillary wealthy? Yes, she is!” Well, what I meant was—“Just say what you mean! You’re slanting your story.”
I explained that all I was trying to do was figure out why she supports Trump. “Why do you support him?” she asked. Uh, I don’t, I said. “Donald speaks the truth. Thank you, goodbye.”
She hung up.
Next was Timothy Doody, 51, Colorado, real estate appraiser.
“I don’t know,” he said when I asked why he donated $500 to Trump. “I don’t know why I do half the things I do. I was probably drunk.”
He laughed. “I’m just kidding. I just think it’s refreshing…I just wanted to make a statement, that’s all.”
Doody explained that he’s a “conservative-leaning person” but a registered Democrat. Mostly, he sighed, “I just am fed up with politicians. I do know [Trump’s] negatives and I do know what he’s done as far as supporting Democrats via his corporations and supporting both parties.” But at the end of the day, Doody said, he liked that Trump could “rabble-rouse” and “make waves.”
Trump’s position on immigration, Doody admitted, was the central reason he made the donation, but he also believes Trump is the best person to repair the economy and to change the course of American foreign policy for the better.
And speaking of immigration, “The other candidates totally took his words out of context,” Doody said, referring to Trump’s claim that undocumented immigrants coming into America from Mexico are “rapists.” Doody said he listened to Trump’s statement “probably 10 times” to see if he had missed it, but in the end came to the conclusion that “he didn’t call all Mexicans rapists.”
In Trump’s absence, Doody guessed he could find another candidate to support. “Probably Ted Cruz, Governor Walker, maybe, and Rand Paul…I don’t understand Jeb Bush.”
Then came Damien Drab, 41, New York City, CEO of Loughlin Management, a company that “delivers a broad range of operational and financial consulting services with a results-oriented approach,” as opposed to all those consulting firms who strive for no results at all.
I told Drab I wanted to talk about his $500 donation to the Trump campaign. He laughed. “Good, I hope that helps with my golf club membership.”
Is he a member of a Trump golf club? “Uh, I can’t comment on anything, really,” he said. “I have one statement and that’s: Why should anyone use their personal money for public affairs?”
Further, Drab went on, it is “unfair” and “ignorant” to tell Trump he needs to use his personal wealth for his race when “everybody else who runs gets contributions.” Because “there’s no inherent personal wealth risk for people who run,” Drab said, there shouldn’t be one for a billionaire, either. Whether he needs the money is irrelevant, Drab argued, because “if you believe in Trump, you should contribute.”
Next was Mike McNerney, 73, California, funeral service provider.
“He’s the greatest thing running,” McNerney said when I asked about his $500 donation to Trump, which he called “just a show of support.”
“I think he’s gonna win,” he told me. “I think he has a pretty good chance. I mean, people are outraged at the way Obama Hussein has run this country.”
McNerney said he likes Trump “because he’s nonpolitical. He tells it like it is. He’s truthful, and he has more experience than being a short-term senator before he became president.” What kind of experience does Trump have, I asked. “At life and management, and I’m sure he has more foreign experience, which Obama Hussein has ruined.”
McNerney agrees with Trump on immigration “absolutely, 1,000 percent,” and believes those expressing disapproval of his statements are “manipulating the press for the benefit of opposition against any sensible immigration policy that comes along.”
I asked McNerney, who repeatedly referred to the president as “Obama Hussein,” if he thought Obama was Muslim. He said, “I know he is.” I asked if he thought Obama was born in America. He replied, “No, I don’t. Probably Africa.” Where in Africa, I wondered. “Wherever his father and his white mother were living.” Kenya? “You got it,” he said.
And Dr. Dane Wallisch, 64, Pennsylvania, radiologist.
“Why did I do it?” Wallisch said when I asked about his $2,700 check to Trump’s campaign. “I think he would be a very strong leader, and I think that’s what we need now. I have very similar beliefs to Donald Trump. I agree with him on just about everything.”
Wallisch agreed with Doody that “the immigration thing, I think, the media took that way out of context.”
He explained that having lived in Mexico for a time, he knows that the government there is corrupt. “Of course there’s good Mexican people, but there’s bad with the good,” he said. And the unsecured border, he told me, is “an open door for terrorists, as well.”
“Trump just speaks what’s on his mind and I like that,” he said. “I think it’s refreshing. It’s time people say what they felt rather than just what people want to hear.” Wallisch apologized for “getting on my soapbox here,” but admitted it was hard to avoid when talking about Trump. “I like him and I hope he becomes president.”
Why donate to a billionaire, though, I wondered. It’s not like he needs it. “True, probably true,” Wallisch said. “But that was my way of saying, ‘I support you.’”
Without Trump, Wallisch said he was sure he could find another candidate to support. “I think there’s a lot of good people running this year. I like Ben Carson—you know who Ben Carson is, right? I like Rand Paul, but he won’t make it. Scott Walker. Bush is all right, but three Bushes? I don’t know. Makes me a little leery.”
By: Olivia Nuzzi, The Daily Beast, July 17, 2015
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