By Chris Powell
Connecticut’s junior U.S. senator, Democrat Chris Murphy, seems to be running for re-election on the premise that open borders are good policy.
First the “compromise” border security legislation he negotiated this year with a Republican senator and a nominally independent senator formally excused thousands more illegal entries indefinitely into the future. The legislation seemed to presume that border security simply isn’t possible.
Now Murphy is telling the country not to worry about illegal immigration at all because, contrary to Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, there is no illegal immigrant crime wave.
“You don’t have to feed into the irrational fear Trump is trying to make people feel,” Murphy said on MSNBC the other day. “It is important to push back on this idea of a migrant crime wave. … Immigrants to this country commit crimes at a rate lower than natural-born Americans.”
Trump has been exploiting the issue of illegal immigration, sometimes disgracefully, as when he remarked that illegal immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country. For this country has no “blood,” no single race. From its Declaration of Independence the United States has aspired to be the universal country, and after 2½ tumultuous centuries it indeed has become the most racially and ethnically diverse one.
But exploiting issues is the highest purpose of political campaigns. That’s what gives people a choice about government policy, and a country without borders is no country at all. Last week Murphy again was making excuses for the inexcusable — the many murders, rapes, and other crimes committed against U.S. residents by illegal immigrants during the open-borders policy of the Biden-Harris administration. Trump’s gathering survivors of these crime victims to call attention to catastrophically mistaken policy is legitimate and compelling.
For so what if illegal immigrants on the whole are more law-abiding than, say, residents of the anarchic, Democrat-ruled cities from which the party draws its big pluralities? This is no consolation for the crimes of illegal immigrants. A decent and competent government is obliged to examine every immigrant and visitor for fitness to be here, not to shrug off still more illegal entrants as Murphy’s “compromise” border-security legislation would have done.
Trump was right to warn Republican senators against it.
Quite apart from the crimes that would not have been committed except for Democratic open-borders policy, there is also the matter of national security.
The country is full of soft targets — power and chemical plants, refineries, dams, hospitals, schools, reservoirs, theaters, and such — just as it now may be full of foreign agents awaiting orders to commence terrorism. Does Murphy not remember the attack committed by foreign agents on September 11, 2001?
Thanks to his party’s open-borders policy, the country now hosts millions of foreigners about whom the government knows little or nothing.
Murphy’s response is: Don’t worry, most of them won’t hurt anyone.
Then there is the trouble caused even by the illegal immigrants who mean no harm and who, like immigrants to the country throughout history, seek only opportunity for better lives. The country should continue to welcome such people — but only insofar as it can accommodate and assimilate them into its secular democracy.
The country’s schools, hospitals, social services, and police were not equipped to handle the flood of immigration prompted by open-borders policy and now are under great strain. The country’s housing supply was already inadequate and now housing costs and homelessness are soaring as illegal immigrants crowd out the poorest Americans. The great increase in unskilled labor from illegal immigrants has put downward pressure on wages for the poor. And a notable minority of recent immigrants, legal and illegal alike, opposes secular democracy, seeks theocracy instead, and is gaining political influence.
Of course even the most conscientious border security wouldn’t catch every threat, but it would catch many.
Senator Murphy’s contention that most illegal immigrants aren’t criminals is contemptibly irrelevant to the problems he keeps excusing. Yet news organizations, showing their bias, keep failing to question him critically about it.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
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Chris Powell column 