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Eli Kantor is a labor, employment and immigration law attorney. He has been practicing labor, employment and immigration law for more than 36 years. He has been featured in articles about labor, employment and immigration law in the L.A. Times, Business Week.com and Daily Variety. He is a regular columnist for the Daily Journal. Telephone (310)274-8216; eli@elikantorlaw.com. For more information, visit beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com and and beverlyhillsemploymentlaw.com

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Thursday, August 20, 2015

Across the Partisan Border

Wall Street Journal (Opinion)
By James Taranto
August 19, 2015

What do Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have in common? We can think of lots of possible answers, but the one we have in mind has to do, believe it or not, with policy: Both have stated, in rather strong terms, their opposition to open immigration.

To be sure, there are big differences in both substance and emphasis. The “Issues” page on Sanders’s campaign website lists eight, immigration not among them. The “Positions” page on Trump’s campaign website lists only one, “Immigration Reform.” In a June speech to the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, Sanders expressed his support for “the 2013 comprehensive immigration reform legislation in the United States Senate” as well as for President Obama’s administrative actions on behalf of illegal aliens.

But as we shall see, when speaking in general terms about the subject, the two sound almost identical.

Trump made news earlier this week when he announced his 1,900-word immigration platform. National Review, a longtime supporter of more-restrictive immigration laws, responded with a critical editorial:

The plan doesn’t address what to do with illegal immigrants already here, which is defensible because enforcement should be the first priority. But Trump’s mouth has gotten far out in front of his written plan, and he continues to talk up a cracked version of amnesty. On Sunday’s Meet the Press, he reiterated his intention to deport, then re-import, current illegal immigrants—a de facto amnesty that is more costly, time-consuming, and logistically fraught than any currently on the table. Additionally, Trump’s stated intention to avoid separating families by sending American-born children with their parents is obviously illegal; the United States government has no authority to deport American citizens.

The editorial also criticizes, among other things, Trump’s calls to make Mexico pay for a border wall (“absurd”), to “impound all remittance payments derived from illegal wages” (“an impossibility”), and to deprive illegal aliens’ children of birthright citizenship (“sure to be a nonstarter”).

Other than that, it’s a pretty good plan. Seriously, that’s NR’s view! The editorial’s headline: “Trump’s Immigration Plan Is a Good Start—for All GOP Candidates.”

Not all GOP candidates agree, especially with the bit about birthright citizenship. CBS News quotes Jeb Bush: “That’s a constitutional right. . . . Mr. Trump can say he’s for this because people are frustrated that it’s abused. We ought to fix the problem rather than take away rights that are constitutionally endowed.” CNN quotes Marco Rubio: “I’m open to doing things that prevent people from coming to the U.S. to take advantage of 14th Amendment, but I’m not in favor of repealing it.”

On the other hand, when MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt asked Scott Walker if he thinks birthright citizenship should be ended, he answered in the affirmative: “Well, like I said, Harry Reid said it’s not right for this country—I think that’s something we should, yeah, absolutely, going forward—” When Hunt pressed him on the matter, his answer became less clear, but as Politifact noted in 2010, Reid was indeed against birthright citizenship for illegal aliens’ children (in 1993), before he was for it.

It should be acknowledged that there is a respectable scholarly argument that the 14th Amendment was not intended to grant citizenship to aliens’ children. NR’s editor, Rich Lowry, has a link to a 2010 Texas Review of Law & Politics article in which the University of Texas’ Lino Graglia makes the case. Such a change, however, would require, if not a constitutional amendment, then the overturning of a 19th-century Supreme Court precedent (U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, 1898) and generations of law and custom. Nonstarter indeed.

It’s news to no one that immigration divides the Republican Party and conservatives, with The Wall Street Journal editorial page and NR being, respectively, the right’s leading journalistic voices for less-restrictive and more-restrictive policies. But the left is divided too, as demonstrated by this fascinating exchange from Sanders’s interview last month with Vox’s Ezra Klein:

Klein: You said being a democratic socialist means a more international view. I think if you take global poverty that seriously, it leads you to conclusions that in the US are considered out of political bounds. Things like sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders. About sharply increasing—

Sanders: Open borders? No, that’s a Koch brothers proposal.

Klein: Really?

Sanders: Of course. That’s a right-wing proposal, which says essentially there is no United States—

Klein: But it would make—

Sanders: Excuse me—

Klein: It would make a lot of global poor richer, wouldn’t it?

Sanders: It would make everybody in America poorer—you’re doing away with the concept of a nation state, and I don’t think there’s any country in the world that believes in that. If you believe in a nation state or in a country called the United States or UK or Denmark or any other country, you have an obligation in my view to do everything we can to help poor people. What right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country, I think we have to do everything we can to create millions of jobs.

To put it another way: “Real immigration reform puts the needs of working people first—not wealthy globetrotting donors. We are the only country in the world whose immigration system puts the needs of other nations ahead of our own. That must change.”

Only that last quote isn’t from Sanders. It‘s the capsule summary of Trump’s immigration plan.

Sanders goes on: “You know what youth unemployment is in the United States of America today? 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?”

Trump says virtually the same thing, with slightly different stats: “Today, nearly 40% of black teenagers are unemployed. Nearly 30% of Hispanic teenagers are unemployed. For black Americans without high school diplomas, the bottom has fallen out: more than 70% were employed in 1960, compared to less than 40% in 2000. . . . The influx of foreign workers holds down salaries, keeps unemployment high, and makes it difficult for poor and working class Americans . . . to earn a middle class wage.”

(As an aside, part of what makes the Vox interview so interesting is Klein’s incredulity. The policy-wonk wunderkind is so doctrinaire in his thinking that he is astonished to discover intellectual diversity on the left.)

Trump also complains of legal aliens’ “welfare abuse” and illegal aliens’ “horrific crimes”—concerns Sanders did not raise in his Vox interview. There may be some common ground on the welfare question, though. In a piece last month for the New Republic, writer Paul Blest noted that Sanders “gets his political inspiration from Scandinavia—particularly Denmark, where 90 percent of residents are of Danish descent.”

Blest’s main point is that Sanders’s admiration for Nordic socialism explains what Blest calls the senator’s “blind spot on race”—i.e., his impatience with identity politics, and in particular the Black Lives Matter movement. But he also notes that his analysis makes apparent “the limits of democratic socialism in America today”—to wit (and this is our analysis, not his), that the kind of social solidarity on which the Danish welfare state depends is much easier to achieve in a culturally homogeneous country.

Immigration is a curious issue in that it divides both left and right at a time of high political polarization. International trade is another one, with the reverse valence—i.e., conservatives are more pro-trade than liberals, who are more pro-immigration than conservatives. Perhaps not surprisingly, trade is another area where Trump and Sanders find common ground. Both are stridently opposed to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, for which National Review’s Kevin Williamson scores Trump:

The real advantage of negotiating a trade deal that requires consensus among such countries as Singapore and Australia is that these countries generally have economic policies that are superior to our own and better suited to the realities of 21st-century markets and economic conditions. Which is to say, it’s an opportunity to leverage Tony Abbott and the ghost of Lee Kuan Yew against Barack Obama on the matter of free markets—a desirable situation for conservatives.

Don’t expect to hear any of that from Donald Trump, who imagines that the global economy is a poker game and is transfixed by the phantasm of the inscrutable Oriental dealing from the bottom of the deck while the sneaky Latin sharpens his machete.

Let’s give credit where due: Those National Review guys make a lot of sense when the subject is trade.

Two Mutters in One!

“So as the facts of the White House cover-up now tumble out into open court, it’s important to remember that if it hadn’t been for Fitzgerald’s work, there’s little doubt the Plame story would have simply faded into oblivion like so many other disturbing suggestions of Bush administration misdeeds. And it would have faded away because lots of high-profile journalists at The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, and NBC wanted it to. In a sense, it was Watergate in reverse. Instead of digging for the truth, lots of journalists tried to bury it.”—Eric Boehlert, MediaMutters.org, Feb. 6, 2007


“Conservatives are using the ongoing examination of Hillary Clinton’s State Department emails to once again make a series of over-the-top accusations that compare her behavior to former President Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal. . . . Over the years, Media Matters [sic] has cataloged at least 16 separate ‘Watergates’ the right has accused the Obama administration of. . . . Watergate involved the president of the United States soliciting a break-in of a political party’s headquarters, suggesting payment of up to $1 million in hush money to bribe the burglars, being ordered by the Supreme Court to produce secret recordings of the planning for the cover-up of the burglary, and the resignation of a president for the first time in U.S. history. Unless the discussion is about events of that magnitude, it isn’t Watergate.”—Oliver Willis, MediaMutters.org, Aug. 18, 2015

For more information, go to:  www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com

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