From media partner Chris Powell:
In a recent newspaper essay, state Sen. Gary Winfield, D-New Haven, laid out clearly the position of most Democratic officials in Connecticut on illegal immigration.
It’s that while illegal immigrants who are caught committing serious crimes should be deported, all illegal immigrants who have not been caught committing serious crimes should be exempt from immigration law. Simple violation of immigration law should be ignored, Winfield wrote, because for every illegal immigrant being caught, detained, and deported for serious crimes under the Trump administration, “there are 15 car wash employees, landscapers, dishwashers, construction workers, and high school students” also being caught, detained, and deported.
It must be hoped that Winfield and the Democrats haven’t thought this through. It would be scary if they have thought it through.
For the policy advocated by Winfield and the Democrats would reopen the invitation given to the world by the Biden administration’s open-borders policy.
The Winfield policy would be a proclamation that anyone can enter the United States at any time and come to Connecticut and stay until he is caught committing a serious crime — that there is no need to examine anyone entering the country illegally, no need to review any entrant’s character, intentions, and risk of becoming a public charge.
This policy also would be a proclamation that Connecticut thinks it can afford an unlimited number of illegal and unvetted immigrants, even though many illegal immigrants have become public charges in one way or another, especially in regard to children who don’t speak English and need extensive remedial education, and even though the state has a desperate shortage of housing for its legal residents and isn’t hurrying to build much more.
President Trump has said reckless, stupid, and hateful things regarding the immigration problem. But that’s no excuse for someone else’s bad policy.
Everyone who enters the United States illegally and is allowed to stay as if the law doesn’t apply to him is an incentive for others to enter illegally, and while most illegal immigrants may have good intentions and behave well, many do not, including many who have come to Connecticut. Just last week a man charged with the sexual assault of a jogger in New Haven was identified as an illegal immigrant from Guatemala who already had been deported twice. He is three times an illegal immigrant.
Millions of inoffensive illegal immigrants don’t justify even one criminal illegal immigrant, and there are thousands of them.
Winfield wrote that he favors a “path to citizenship” for illegal immigrants. But the United States has nearly the most liberal immigration policy in the world and already offers such a path. It begins with legal and properly vetted entry to the country.
Of course none of this matters if Winfield and the Democrats make excuses for open borders because most illegal immigrants concentrate in Democratic urban areas and lead to the creation of more safely Democratic congressional districts at the expense of politically competitive and Republican districts.
In that case Winfield and the Democrats have thought their policy through and it’s not really humane at all. It’s a political racket.
NOT A NATIONAL HERO: Charlie Kirk was a brave advocate of free speech and conservative policies who sought to engage honestly with his adversaries, many of whom are disgraceful perpetrators of cancel culture.
But Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, never held public office and, being a political partisan, was not a national hero at the time of his murder. President Trump’s ordering the national flag to be flown at half staff to honor Kirk was a partisan gesture, accompanied by the president’s denunciation of his adversaries on the political left.
Brave as Kirk was, millions did not think well of him. Indeed, many people are even celebrating Kirk’s murder.
This political division is why the flag should not have been lowered for Kirk — and now this lowering may be taken as precedent by a future administration for bestowing honors on some mere partisan on the political left.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
