Will The Democrats Figure Out How To Take Advantage Of The Immigration Mess Or Will They Cluelessly Shoot Themselves In The Head, Again?
By David Grace (www.DavidGraceAuthor.com)
Then And Now
A hundred years ago most jobs were unskilled jobs.
A hundred years ago you could grab just about anyone with a strong back and basic reading skills and put them to work.
A hundred years ago there were plenty of American jobs for unskilled, uneducated, non-English-speaking workers.
Those days are gone forever.
Unlike a hundred years ago, today, unskilled, uneducated, non-English-speaking workers are not a national asset. They are a national liability.
Most Americans Oppose Letting In A Flood Of Unskilled Foreigners
For this reason I think that not only most Americans but most Americans who vote Democrat oppose letting thousands of unskilled, uneducated, non-English-speaking immigrants into the United States.
Sure, we’re all sorry for the poor Syrians and, in fact, the poor and oppressed people all around the world, but do we feel so sorry for them that we want to let them flood into an industrialized country that does not have enough living-wage jobs for its own people, leastwise for them?
Do we feel sorry enough for them that we want to take on the task of educating, feeding, housing and providing medical care to everybody in the world whose lives, sadly, are crap?
Altruism is all well and good, but only up to a point.
The idea that we want to be nice to people and help out those in need is laudable, up to a point, but the idea of adding thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of uneducated, unskilled, non-English-speaking people to the U.S. population, people who will need, food, housing, education and medical treatment, primarily at taxpayer expense, is, in my opinion, both immensely unpopular with almost everybody and a really, really, really bad idea.
This Was One Of The Main Forces Driving Brexit
I think that one of the principle reasons a majority of U.K. citizens voted to leave the Common Market was their desire to regain control of the British borders and to prevent untrained, uneducated, non-English-speaking refugees from flooding into the UK.
Democrats Will Either Need To Fix This Or Be Blamed For It
The MIC (Megalomaniac In Chief) and his supporters like to claim that Democrats want “open borders.” That’s as false as most of the stuff the MIC says, but it’s still going to sink the Democrats if they don’t knock that claim down, quick.
If the Democrats’ Congressional leadership has a functioning brain in their collective heads they will act ASAP to take that particular box of bullets out of the MIC’s hands.
What The House Dems Could Do
The House Democrats could propose a new immigration law that drastically tightens the asylum grounds for gaining legal entry into the U.S. This is something the Republicans would support.
In return, the new law would also include:
- The existing DACA provisions, and
- Establishing a ten-year statute of limitations for the crime of illegal entry into the U.S.
Any arrest during that ten years would reveal a person’s illegal status and they would be gone, but if they stayed out of trouble and below the radar for ten years they could stay.
Why would that be a good idea?
It’s called creating an incentive to follow the rules, work hard and stay out of trouble. Talk about motivated. This would create the most hard-working, law-abiding group of people imaginable. That’s good for them and good for the country.
So, here’s the deal the Democrats could offer:
- A drastic restriction in the asylum law
- Shift immigration slots more to a merit/education-based criteria
- People who were brought here as children and who have lived here crime-free under the DACA rules could stay,
- People who came here without papers but who managed to live here for at least ten years without coming to the government’s attention could register and get a Green Card.
I think a bill like that would have a chance of passing in the House. If it passed in the Senate, well and good. If the Senate Republicans killed it then the Democrats could say:
“Hey, we tried to narrow the immigration rules. We tried to change to a more merit-based system. We tried to tighten up the borders, but the Republicans blocked us from fixing this problem.”
But Will The Dems Act?
The question now is whether the Democrats will be able to read the mood of the country or if they will be as clueless and tone-deaf in 2019 as they were in 2016?
The Democrats’ decades-long obliviousness to what really matters to working class and middle class Americans does not fill me with hope that they will get it right this time around.
If they don’t then I’m even more convinced that it’s time to start a new party, maybe call it the Central Party, and leave both the Republican and Democratic ideological fringes behind.
— David Grace (www.DavidGraceAuthor.com)
To see a searchable list of all David Grace’s columns in chronological order, CLICK HERE
