Flashback: When Democrats Had Common Sense on Immigration (Not that Long Ago)
NXR's Wesley Todd reminds us
NXR’s own Wesley Todd dropped a barn-burner of a tweet that we wanted to expand upon. He QT’d a video the Department of Homeland Security put out compiling old footage of Democrats, Barack Obama, and Chuck Schumer, chief among them, arguing for tight immigration restrictions in language that would get a Democrat congressman primaried and called a bigot in 2026. It’s the kind of clip that plays like satire until you check the dates and realize it’s real, and it’s not old enough to be ancient history. Some of it is barely fifteen years old. Most of us have forgotten exactly how much the Democratic Party has changed on immigration since Mad Max: Fury Road was in theaters. It feels like it must surely be from Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. It wasn’t. It was circa 2010.
In June 2009, addressing the Migration Policy Institute at Georgetown Law, the man who now calls border enforcement “inhumane,” Chuck Schumer, stood up and said, “Illegal immigration is wrong, and a primary goal of comprehensive immigration reform must be to dramatically curtail future illegal immigration.” Wrong. A moral judgment and everything. Can you believe that?
Schumer kept going. He rejected the phrase “undocumented workers” outright, telling the room that using euphemisms “conveys a message to the American people that their government is not serious about combating illegal immigration, which the American people overwhelmingly oppose.” Then he said, “People who enter the United States without our permission are illegal aliens, and illegal aliens should not be treated the same as people who entered the United States legally.” That is not a Fox News pundit doing an impression of Chuck Schumer. Schumer, on camera, laying out seven principles for immigration reform that begin with the words “illegal immigration is wrong, plain and simple.”
What a bigot, am I right?
Wesley built a timeline explaining why the hypocrisy exists in the first place, and it’s a better argument than most of what passes for immigration commentary on either side. The thesis, in short: the labor left used to oppose immigration on wage-protection grounds, the Bush-era GOP had no reason to object to expanding it, and then Trump came along in 2016 and attacked every category of immigration at once, legal and illegal, refugees and H-1Bs and green cards alike.
Because he opposed the whole system, the left decided it had to defend the whole system, and the old wage-based labor critique got orphaned overnight. What used to be common sense started sounding like a MAGA talking point, so the people who used to say it stopped saying it. That’s the inversion. It’s a spot-on analysis, and we wanted to provide some receipts.
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