Proving that Hillary Clinton will say anything if she thinks it will benefit her politically, we have the video below from 2014 in which she advocates sending unaccompanied children who had been pouring into the United States back home. The video does not exactly coincide with the current controversy over DACA. The people affected by DACA are primarily teens and adults who were brought across the border when they were children and who were granted a kind of temporarily amnesty by President Barack Obama with a constitutionally dubious executive order.
President Trump has announced that he intends to rescind (maybe) that order but has given Congress six months to come up with a permanent and legal solution.
What does the video say about Hillary Clinton?
Clinton has, putting the matter mildly, “evolved” on the subject of illegal immigration. As Hot Air notes, Senator Clinton was against all Illegal Immigration as late as 2003. By 2015, when her second campaign for the presidency was ramping up, Clinton was fully on board with the received liberal wisdom that there should be no borders and everyone should be allowed to immigrate regardless of anything. Democrats have shrewdly concluded that the quicker illegal immigrants can be legalized and then given citizenship and the vote, the faster their party can regain electoral dominance.
Hillary Clinton on DACA
Needless to say, Clinton is all in favor of DACA and has condemned Trump’s move, feeding the meme that 800,000 Americans in all but name will be rounded up and sent back to countries that they never knew as adults. Like the rest of Trump’s critics, Clinton is misrepresenting what the president wants to do.
Trump is actually trying to legalize the status of the so called “Dreamers,” which requires an act of Congress to accomplish. In a sane world, Congress would set out to work doing just that, with safeguards to make sure that hordes of illegal immigrants do not pour over the border, children in hand, to take advantage of a moral loophole in the nation’s immigration laws.
However, we do not live in a sane world.
The issue of illegal immigration is potent and divisive. Both political sides cheerfully use the issue to whip the bases into a frenzy. The purpose of efforts to deal with the problem has often not been so much to solve it but to use it to political advantage. Trump was as guilty of this during the 2016 campaign as were his opponents. The usefulness of illegal immigration as a political cudgel means that it may never be solved.