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Originally Posted by opendoor
Not wholesale, no. But they've definitely moved right on some key issues. Immigration for one, both compared to recent years and longer term trends.
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What timeframe are we looking at? Here’s Bill Clinton’s state of the union address in 1995:
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All Americans, not only in the states most heavily affected but in every place in this country, 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. That’s why our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more, by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before, by cracking down on illegal hiring, by barring welfare benefits to illegal aliens...
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Hard to imagine any Democrat making those statements today.
As recently as 2005, there was little difference in the stance of Republicans and Democrats towards immigration. In the last decade, it’s Democrats who have changed most. If the Biden/Harris administration is making a course correction, it’s back towards the approach of the Obama years, which was itself much more liberal than under Clinton.
Democrats used to see immigration as a labour/economic issue, and the labour movement has historically regarded low-skilled immigration as a threat to wages and bargaining power. Until recently, border security was a bipartisan issue - the 2008 Democratic Party convention called for improved border security and hiring more border agents. It’s only in the last 10 years or so that Democrats have championed immigration as primarily a human rights issue.
https://www.npr.org/2019/02/19/69480...nged-the-party
Here’s a speech by Obama in 2007.
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To fix the system in a way that does not require us to revisit the same problem in twenty years, I continue to believe that we need stronger enforcement on the border and at the workplace. And that means a workable mandatory system that employers must use to verify the legality of their workers...
With regard to the most pressing part of the immigration challenge -- the 12 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. -- we must create an earned path to citizenship. Now, no one condones unauthorized entry into the United States. And by supporting an earned path to citizenship, I am not saying that illegal entry should go unpunished. The path to permanent residence and eventual citizenship must be tough enough to make it clear that an unauthorized entry was wrong and will be punished.
https://www.americanrhetoric.com/spe...mmigration.htm
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Very different from the way Democrats have been talking about the issue in recent years, when they became hostile to even couching the issue in terms of ‘legality,’ let alone vowing to punish unauthorized entry.