Lib Columnist Pleads With Dems: Give Trump 'His F****** Wall' or We're Finished
New York magazine recently published a piece supporting President Donald Trump’s border wall — and the article did not have a dateline of April 1.
Yes, it’s true — an Op-Ed piece by a fierce Trump critic in the liberal publication has urged Democrats to support the building of a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico.
Andrew Sullivan wrote last month that allowing construction of a wall is probably the first step in alleviating the crush of families trying to enter the U.S. illegally and how to handle them after being detained.
Admittedly, Sullivan does not believe a wall will truly work to stop illegal immigration. But he does believe that Democrats giving in to the biggest item Trump promised voters on the first day of his presidential campaign is a necessary first step of trying to fix what’s causing the current border crisis.
“If you do not want to jail kids with their parents indefinitely, or to maintain the incentive for illegal migrants to bring kids along for the harrowing ride, you need some sort of congressional action and soon,” Sullivan said. “There’s something deeply wrong, it seems to me, with expressing the view that what the government is doing is barbaric and yet allowing the underlying cause of it to continue for political reasons. If that’s the case, then Trump is not the only one using kids as pawns. Chuck Schumer is too.”
Sullivan also urges Democrats to open their eyes and realize that tougher stances on immigration are what the majority of voters want to see.
“The Democrats need to accept that they lost the last presidential election for a reason, and that their opponent’s main campaign pledge was to tackle illegal immigration, with a wall at the southern border as the centerpiece,” Sullivan said. “Completely resisting a legitimate agenda based on a clear campaign promise — well, it reminds me of the Republicans with Obamacare.
“And there is clearly an adamant, persistent segment of the public that sees the crisis of illegal immigration as a vital one. They’re not alone. Cast an eye at Brexit Britain, newly populist Italy, Macron’s France, and even Merkel’s Germany as it heaves in response to mass immigration from the developing world. This is a huge force in Western politics in every country. It may be the primary one.
“Finding the right balance between reason and compassion is essential if we are not going to further tear this country apart, or witness ever more humanitarian catastrophes, or see what’s left of the West go under.”
Sullivan said allowing Trump to build the wall will not only allow Democrats to win some points with the middle class, it will also allow Democrats to negotiate for real immigration reform.
“So give him his f—g wall. He won the election. He is owed this,” Sullivan said. “It may never be completed; it may not work, as hoped. But it is now the only way to reassure a critical mass of Americans that mass immigration is under control, and the only way to make any progress under this president. And until the white working and middle classes are reassured, we (Democrats) will get nowhere.
“Don’t give it to him for nothing, of course. It should come with a full path to citizenship for all DACA immigrants … But it should also go bigger: a legislative fix for Flores; massive new funding for detention facilities, humane family-friendly housing, and, above all, much more money for the immigration legal system, now completely overwhelmed by asylum cases. If Democrats can show they want to deal with the humanitarian problem as a whole, and are willing to compromise on the wall, they’ll be in a much stronger position going forward than in the recent past.”
Sullivan says if Democrats want to boot Trump out of the White House in 2020, they have to avoid the mistake Hillary Clinton made in the last campaign by labeling anyone who spoke against an “open borders” policy as a racist. He says employing a stance on illegal immigration that can be spun as compassionate while having the nation’s best interest in mind is the recipe to a 2020 victory.
“The Democrats who are currently posturing are playing a good card badly. They give off the appearance, as Hillary Clinton did, of making no distinction between legal and illegal immigration, favoring de facto open borders, and calling anyone who disagrees with them a white supremacist,” Sullivan wrote.
“Until they recognize that illegal immigration is a huge and legitimate problem, and until they propose a set of actual policy proposals to end it humanely and efficiently, they run the risk of another 2016 in 2020.”
Sullivan is far from the first person to try and explain common sense to Democrats, but it would probably surprise a lot of Dems to learn just how many people actually believe it’s smart and prudent for the U.S. to have some say over who comes into the country.
Legal immigration has played a big part in the success of the U.S., and illegal immigration is a tremendous drain on the country’s resources. That doesn’t seem like such a hard lesson to learn, but if Trump’s critics are finally admitting it, then maybe Republicans are finally getting their point across.
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