Senator Bernie Sanders’ Record of Public Statements on Immigrant Workers

At the Democratic presidential debate earlier this week, Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Bernie Sanders both championed the rights of immigrants.    JM Rieger for the Washington Post looks carefully at Senator Sanders’ public statements over the years on immigrants and embraced the notion that immigrants can damage the wage scale for U.S. workers, a view that both President Trump and former Attorney General Jeff Sessions also have publicly embraced.

Rieger notes that

“A Fix review of more than nine hours of Sanders’s appearances over the past decade reveal how, for years, Sanders often argued against increasing legal immigration to the United States out of fear that it would lower wages for U.S. workers, a view that is disputed by many economists. You can watch Sanders’s remarks over the years in the video above.”

In addition,

“`Open borders? No, that’s a Koch brothers proposal,’ Sanders told Vox in 2015, referring to billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch. ” … I think from a moral responsibility, we’ve got to work with the rest of the industrialized world to address the problems of international poverty, but you don’t do that by making people in this country even poorer.”

Similarly,

“In December, Sanders explained it this way to the New York Times Editorial Board: `If you’re undocumented, and you’re being paid five bucks an hour, why am I going to pay her $12 an hour?’”

KJ