Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, asked that question last week in an opinion piece for the NY Post.
Is it, as many believe, that the Dems are merely fishing for new voters, to displace an electorate they despise with more tractable ones?
That’s partially true, but currently one needs to be a citizen to vote, and he says most are not going to be naturalized anytime soon.
Or is it that the Democrat Party is trying to increase the political power of blue states by packing them with new residents?
That’s would be a very indirect and long-term strategy, says Krikorian, and an iffy one, since many migrants settle in red states, not blue.
No, he believes, the answer is simpler than that. The left just has come to believe that preventing anyone from coming here is morally wrong. He sums up the open-borders attitude this way:
They simply don’t believe that the American people have the right to keep anyone out. They see immigration limits of any kind as just another version of Jim Crow, a way of discriminating against foreigners who are just seeking a better life. And anyway, America is an illegitimate settler-colonial regime founded by phallocratic slaveholders and Indian-killers, so who are we to tell other people they can’t move here if they want?
This anti-American sentiment has long prevailed in the “fever-swamps of Blue-Anon,” Krikorian says, but it has over the past couple of decades become a litmus test for Democrat politicians. He sums up the myriad effects of the new litmus test this way:
The litmus test of open borders has led the ACLU to turn away from the cause of free speech, the Sierra Club from environmental protection, Big Labor from protecting the American worker, and the black political establishment from promoting the interests of their ostensible constituents.
It would “almost be better,” he writes, if the progressives were merely cynical vote scroungers. As it is, the truth is “deeper, more disturbing, and less amenable to a political solution.” That’s what we’re up against.
For more, see the NY Post.