Illegal Immigration: It's About Power

Illegal Immigration: It's About Power presented by Tucker Carlson

I recently watched a group of protestors, most of them young, denouncing President Donald Trump’s immigration policies. They were waving Mexican flags and shouting: “¡Si, se puede!”—"Yes, we can!”

This is now the rallying cry of the open-borders left, but it wasn’t always. In fact, I wondered if a single person at the protest knew where it came from.

The slogan first became famous fifty years ago, thanks to Cesar Chavez. He was the founder of the United Farm Workers union. When Chavez said “Si, se puede,” he meant something very different: “Yes, we can… seal the borders.”

Cesar Chavez hated illegal immigration.

Two decades later, leading Democrats were still wary of mass immigration, especially illegal immigration. As Bill Clinton put it in the 1995 State of the Union address, “…Americans… are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country. The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants. The public services they use impose burdens on our taxpayers.”

No prominent Democrat would say anything like that today without being denounced as a racist. Clinton got a standing ovation.

As late as 2006, there were still liberals who cared about the economic effects of immigration, legal or illegal. “Immigration reduces the wages of domestic workers who compete with immigrants,” explained economist Paul Krugman in the New York Times. “…We’ll need to reduce the inflow of low-skilled immigrants. Mainly, that means better controls on illegal immigration.” 

That same year, Senator Hillary Clinton voted for a fence on the Mexican border. So did Barack Obama and Chuck Schumer and 23 other Senate Democrats.

Not anymore.

Twenty years after Bill Clinton told Americans they had the right to be upset about illegal immigration, his wife scolded the country for enforcing border controls.

So, what changed?

Not the economics of it. The law of supply and demand remained in effect. It’s not a coincidence that as illegal immigration surged, wages for American workers stagnated. What changed is that Democrats stopped caring about those workers. About the middle class, really.

Why?

Here’s the answer, in four simple facts.

One: According to a recent study from Yale, there are at least 22 million illegal immigrants living in the United States.

Two: Democrats plan to give all of them citizenship. Read the Democrats’ 2016 party platform.

Three: Studies show the overwhelming majority of first-time immigrant voters vote Democrat.

Four: The biggest landslide in American presidential history was only 17 million votes.

The payoff for Democrats: permanent electoral majority for the foreseeable future. In a word: power.

That’s the point, no matter what they tell you; American workers be damned.