MEDITERRANEAN SEA (July 29, 2016) Migrants aboard an inflatable vessel approach the guided-missile destroyer USS Carney (DDG 64). (U.S. navy photo by Chief Information Systems Technician Wesley R. Dickey/Released)
At The American Conservative, James Pinkerton explains how Hillary Clinton surprised the entire pro-illegal-immigration establishment on the left with her admission that Europe’s misguided immigration policies “lit the flame.” She also said the continent needs to “get a handle on migration.” Pinkerton writes (abridged):
Progressives melt down after the Democratic doyenne denounces open borders here and in Europe.
Hillary Clinton, arguably still the biggest name in Democratic politics, has just said that conservatives were right. She has conceded the essence of the rightist—and, by the way, centrist—critique of the open-borders approach to immigration.
On November 22, Clinton said in an interview with The Guardian, “I think Europe needs to get a handle on migration because that is what lit the flame.”
To be sure, Clinton is no convert to Trumpism. Indeed, lest anyone think she was, she also told The Guardian that the president has “a strong streak of racism…the whole package of bigotry.”
Yet the immediate reaction to Clinton’s words was cautious incredulity. As The New York Times put it later that day, “Mrs. Clinton’s remarks to The Guardian drew criticism and a dose of surprise from an array of scholars, immigration advocates and pundits on both the left and the right, some of whom were so perplexed by the comments that they wondered aloud whether Mrs. Clinton had perhaps misspoken.
Undeniably, a new hard-nosed pessimism about population flows is creeping into the discussion, even among the Davos Men. In September, tycoon-turned-philanthropist Bill Gates said, perhaps somewhat awkwardly, that African population growth was “the elephant in the room.”
Meanwhile, some on the right are welcoming the shift in Western attitudes. Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz, elected last year on a strong border-security platform, observed recently, “There are a lot of things that have changed. A lot of people who said [the Merkel Migration of 2015] is beneficial for Europe, it is necessary for our demography, do not say it any more.”
Of course, the hottest immigration issue in the U.S. these days is the fate of the caravan at our border with Mexico. It’s impossible to know what will happen there.
Read more here.
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