Supporting Political-Asylum Immigration Will Be Toxic For The Democrats
By David Grace (www.DavidGraceAuthor.com)
Brexit Passed Because Of The Brits’ Desire To Control Immigration
If the EU had adopted immigration policies that allowed its member nations to elect to close their borders to people who had neither been born in an EU country nor legally lived in an EU country for at least ten years, Britain would still be part of the European Union.
Make no mistake. Brexit was all about the U.K. retaking its ability to selectively close its borders to people who were born outside the U.K.
When given the choice between helping thousands of pitiful, destitute refugees find a better life by coming to your country or not, in the recent election the Brits soundly chose “not.”
Humans Are Territorial
If you want to take only one lesson from Brexit and the recent U.K. elections it’s this:
People are territorial. Most people are motivated to pursue their own, personal self interest by protecting their territory from impoverished strangers rather than the desire to help tens or hundreds of thousands of strangers in need.
I’m not talking about morally right or wrong. I’m talking about factually is or is not.
The world is full of countries where people are destitute, abused, oppressed, violated and killed by their governments, gangs or both. Altruistic people want to help them by offering, “Come here to Western Europe, U.K., Australia, Canada and the U.S.A. for a better life.”
The self-serving response of a majority of the people who already live in Western Europe, U.K., Australia, Canada and the U.S.A. is “Hell No!”
A human being’s desire to protect their territory is both strong and instinctive. It’s not an accident that Mr. T seized on the fear of massive immigration by poor people as the first plank in his campaign platform.
The Idea Of Political Asylum Started With Fighting Communism
Back in the days of the cold war, we were obsessed with the idea of defeating evil, Godless, communism. People fleeing totalitarian, communist rule were seen as heroes and ideological brothers.
It didn’t hurt that almost all of them were educated and lived so far away from us that very few of them were actually likely to be able to claim political asylum. We weren’t in danger of hundreds of thousands of East Germans, Hungarians, or Russians knocking on our door, asking us to let them in.
The whole notion of “political asylum” for victims of oppressive governments wasn’t seen as particularly threatening because it really only applied to a few hundred or a few thousand people a year, most of whom were educated and spoke English.
The Communist refugees who showed up here were usually scientists, athletes, entertainers and the like who were in the U.S. on some state-sanctioned visit and who managed to slip away from their minders. In this regard, if you haven’t seen it, check out Moscow On The Hudson.
Cuba posed a bit of a challenge because those refugees were mostly poor, uneducated, and non-English speaking, but they still had to get across 90 miles of water in a small boat so that greatly limited their numbers.
Laws Allowing Political Asylum From Communist Countries Applied To Other Countries Too
But when people figured out that these communist-inspired political-asylum rules could be used to admit refugees from Mexico and Central America, hundreds of thousands of people started showing up.
Suddenly, the policy of admitting refugees from any oppressive government or society didn’t seem like such a good idea after all.
Additionally, if illegal immigrants managed to get across the border and were later captured, they had a legal right to demand a hearing to determine if they qualified as a political refugee, a costly and time-consuming process. And because there were insufficient facilities to incarcerate these undocumented immigrants for the months or years the judicial process would require, they could just disappear again.
What Do Most Americans Think?
It’s my opinion that most American voters, including Democrats, are opposed to open borders.
I think that most voters, including Democrats, do not want to allow tens, leastwise hundreds of thousands of poor, uneducated, non-English-speaking people to flood into the U.S. in order to give them a better life here than they would have in the country of their birth.
In my opinion, if you want to lose a U.S. election, any U.S. election, just campaign on the promise to open the borders to everyone whose homeland is run by a corrupt or oppressive government or whose society is materially controlled by criminal gangs.
Just look at England. In spite of all of the many advantages to the U.K. of remaining in the EU, the British voters, including dedicated Labor Party members, voted Conservative in order to be able to close the U.K. borders.
Democrats Will Not Be Able To Dodge This Issue
The GOP will not allow the Democratic candidates to ignore this issue. The Democrats are going to have to take a stand on it.
Supporting Large-Scale Political-Asylum Immigration Is Political Suicide
Any Democrat who starts talking about how sorry he/she is for the poor immigrants and how hard their lives are in their home countries and how wonderful their lives would be once they were allowed to enter the U.S. will lose.
Support for immigration in order to help those poor people is a politically toxic policy. It is a naked wire charged up to a million volts. Any candidate who touches it is going to get fried.
Any Democrat who is considering which side of this issue to be on needs only to take a look at the solidly Labor U.K. districts that elected Conservative Members of Parliament for the first time in decades to understand that anything less than supporting clear restrictions on political-asylum immigration will be fatal to their candidacy.
Those Democrats who fail to support strict limits on political-asylum admissions and clearly oppose any idea of open borders, will lose.
— David Grace (www.DavidGraceAuthor.com)
