Politics means never having to say you’re sorry. When a party turns on its heel and walks away from a policy, it pretends nothing of note is happening and wouldn’t dream of issuing a mea culpa.
Have you noticed how quiet Democrats are about President Donald Trump’s deportation of illegal immigrants? So far, these are mostly hardened criminals, the world’s riff-raff whom the blue party argued for years must be given sanctuary from Trump so they weren’t held to account for their predations on American citizens. But Democrats don’t want to be seen that way anymore, and their foot-shuffling embarrassment while Trump flies undesirables home is part of an effort to execute a U-turn away from what lost them the White House and Capitol Hill in the November election.
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris knew they needed to change course in 2024 to avoid the crushing defeat that their bosses, former President Barack Obama and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), could see hurtling toward them. So, having culpably opened wide the southern border, they suddenly presented themselves as tougher on illegal immigration than the GOP. This ludicrous claim was precariously balanced on Republicans’ rejection, under orders from Trump, of a border bill that was camouflaged to look serious but would actually have facilitated a continued flood of illegal immigrants.
Election results, however, have a way of clarifying matters, and, in a flash of Damascene light, Democrats saw that their policy of facilitating mass illegal immigration is unpopular. It is also utterly immoral, which is another reason why Americans hate it. Citizens of a nation-state must have the right to decide who they let into their country to live with them.
Democrats are in a quandary. Their muscle memory, which was developed over decades, is to support anything that works against America. This has been reinforced in recent years by an instinct to reverse everything advocated by Trump. But they don’t want the orange man to get all the credit for restoring national sovereignty. They want voters to see them as protecting America, too.
So they’re stuck. When Trump jabbed his finger into the chest of Colombia’s recalcitrant pipsqueak president, Gustavo Petro, last weekend and forced him to take back Colombian criminals illegally in the United States, there was hardly a peep from Democrats.
It’s true that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), perhaps recalling her days as a barmaid, fretted that retaliatory tariffs would push up the cost of a cup of coffee. But that protest hardly matched her histrionics during Trump’s first administration, when she collapsed in a puddle of grief for photographers outside a Texas facility holding illegal immigrants.
Now that Biden is safely dispatched to the ash heap of presidential failures, Democrats don’t mind that Obama was sometimes referred to as “deporter in chief.” In those long-ago days of fiscal 2009, he deported 389,834 illegal immigrants, continuing the policies of former President George W. Bush, who in the previous year deported 369,221. Indeed, Obama kept expelling large numbers for most of his presidency. It was only in his last year, fiscal 2016, that deportations collapsed to 65,332.
What happened? Democrats, including such hard lefties as socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who previously opposed mass low-skill immigration because it depressed domestic wages, caved to activists and ideologues who took the intersectional and postnational view that America was an illegitimate and racist country that should not exclude anyone from a poor nation who wanted to live here.
Such malign leftist thinking dominated Democrats’ agenda for the next eight years, through Trump’s first term and Biden’s only term in the White House. Its consequence was the abandonment of low-skill American workers, who disliked being sacrificed to wokeism and so became fervent MAGA supporters.
Politicians and parties want power more than anything else and, after a painful period in the wilderness, generally abandon ideas and policies that keep them from winning elections. So Democrats now want to lure blue-collar workers back. The party is still saturated with the anti-American prejudices that got it into trouble, but it wants to shed that unattractive image, and the first step in doing so is to avoid decrying deportations.
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Those now making the most noise against Trump’s mass expulsions are the pressure groups and activists — “immigrants’ rights groups” — who transformed the party’s policies on the border and immigration during the Obama years.
They will try to keep Democrats from slinking away and adopting policies that might win back voters. But these postnationalists are likely to find Democrats less willing to listen than they were before. Even so, while watching the Democrats do their U-turn, don’t hold your breath waiting for them to admit, “We got it wrong.”