Snatching Defeat on Immigration

Congratulations, President Obama and my fellow Democrats. You have managed to turn a winning issue for our party - immigration - into a losing one. Poll after poll is showing strong opposition to the President's policies with respect to the immigration issue.

It has gotten so bad that the majority of Americans want less legal immigration, and independents have switch solidly into the Republican camp on this issue. How did Democrats screw this up so badly?

By betraying legal immigrants, and selling the farm on behalf of those who are in the US illegally. The Senate "Gang of Eight" bill has little for legal immigrants, and most of what might benefit them is offset by tens of billions of dollars of unfunded and wasteful security spending which will inevitably catch legal immigrants in its net. I especially love how they "solved" the problem of backlogs of up to twenty years for some visa types - not by speeding up the lines, but by eliminating those visa types completely! Brilliant!

What America needs is a full-throated, unabashed pro-legal-immigration party, a party that refutes the false and ugly claim (believed by 63% of Americans) that legal immigration harms the economy. Instead, we have an anti-immigration Republican party, and a Democratic party who only seems to care about securing another round of amnesty. Americans are siding with the former, and despite my extremely pro-immigration attitudes, I can certainly understand why. Hopefully my fellow liberals figure this out soon, or we are going to get hammered at the ballot box.