Note to Dems: Simply Not Being Racist Isn’t Enough on Immigration Reform
Julianne Hing in The Nation incisively analyzes the first Democratic presidential debate. As she put it, “[i]mmigration came in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it flash at Tuesday night’s Democratic presidential debate. The takeaway line you’ve likely heard was Hillary Clinton offering self-congratulatory remarks to her fellow party members’ handling of the topic: `I want to follow up because I think underneath [CNN correspondent] Juan Carlos’s important questions, there is such a difference between everything you’re hearing on this stage, and what we hear from the Republicans.’” Hing notes that Clinton was right: “In last night’s light, breeze-through talk on guest-worker programs, in-state college tuition for undocumented immigrants, and the expansion of Obamacare for undocumented children, Jim Webb, Lincoln Chafee, Martin O’Malley, Clinton, and Bernie Sanders refrained from uttering a single xenophobic remark about immigrants. The Donald Trump show this was not.”
But Clinton’s statement also highlighted how very low the bar is right now for Democrats, dragged as it’s been into the gutters by Trump. So long as Democrats hold off on openly racist derision of immigrants, they’re already winning. Or are they?
KJ