The Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank financed in part by George Soros is warning Democrats that they have badly misplayed the immigration issue and it could hurt them badly during the 2020 elections because they have consistently refused to do anything about the border crises and their push for open borders.
They say that Democrats have handed the law and order plank to the Republicans and made it virtually impossible to get the votes of anyone who does oppose open borders.
The warning is coming too late as the Democrats for the presidency have put themselves on the record as favoring unlimited illegal immigration.
But a new report from an influential liberal think tank, provided to The Daily Beast, posits that the party’s decision to cede the “rule of law” ground to Republicans creates “the false dichotomy of America as either a nation of immigrants or a nation of laws”—making the party and its candidates appear soft on enforcement, and potentially weakening future attempts for humanitarian-focused immigration reform.
In doing so, writes Tom Jawetz, vice president of immigration policy at the Center for American Progress, supporters of humane immigration policy “have ceded powerful rhetorical ground to immigration restrictionists, who are happy to masquerade as the sole defenders of America as a nation of laws.”
Jawetz—a former immigration attorney and chief counsel on the Immigration Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee, differentiates “the rule of law” and Trump’s “law and order” rhetoric, calling the latter “an enforcement-heavy vision of social control that is generally used as a racially coded dog whistle.”
For Democrats to achieve a fair and functional immigration system, they have to patch the immigration system’s fragmented legal framework, Jawetz writes—instead of “relying increasingly upon administrative discretion to save the system from itself.”