For the opening monologue of his Thursday night broadcast of Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” host Tucker Carlson criticized the reported deal President Donald Trump made with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer over the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) immigration policy.
According to Carlson, this deal would give legal status to 800,000 illegal aliens and Trump would not get any of the things he advocated on immigration during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Transcript as follows:
Last night, at a dinner with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, President Trump apparently hammered out the framework to a deal that would protect 800,000 illegal aliens now covered under DACA from being deported. They will get to stay, and under current law, so will millions of their relatives.
It would be a massive amnesty, one of the biggest ever granted in American history. This is thrilling news for Democrats and for open borders advocates everywhere. In return for this concession, the president receives nothing — no reduction in overall immigration totals, no tightened restriction on foreign workers who take jobs from Americans, no e-Verify to prevent illegal immigrants working under the table, no end to chain migration. The president isn’t even getting a border wall, though he insisted he will somehow get one later, possibly.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REPORTER: If you are not able to get something in six months, will you continue the DACA program?
TRUMP: We’ll talk about that, but I think a deal will be made within six months.
REPORTER: No relief for the wall, is that what you’re saying?
TRUMP: At some point they’re going to have to. They cannot obstruct the wall. The wall, to me, is vital. If I don’t get the wall, then we will become the obstruction.
(CROSSTALK)
TRUMP: We have to have an understanding that, whether it is in the budget or some other vehicle, in a fairly short period of time, the wall will be funded. Otherwise, we’re not doing anything.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: The president seems confident it will work out in the end, but there’s no reason to be optimistic. The fate of DACA recipients is, by far, the biggest piece of leverage he has or he ever will have. If he gives it away for free, none of his other immigration priorities, the priorities he ran on and won the presidency with will be considered.
All those border security measures to keep hearing about? They’re ridiculous. They mean nothing. They haven’t worked and in any case, they’ll be rolled back instantly the next time a Democratic president wins.
If this president doesn’t get funding for a wall now, it will never be built, period.
In Israel and Hungary, walls have proven remarkably effective at controlling who crosses borders and that is why Democrats oppose one on our border — not because it won’t work, but precisely because it will work.
The Democratic Party has no interest in halting the flow of illegal immigrants no matter how much it might hurt Americans who already live here. They’ve done the math. Democrats lost in 2016 because our middle class rejected them.
That means they got two options now. They can embrace the issues the middle class cares about or they can import an entirely new electorate from the third world and change the demographics of the U.S. so completely they will never lose again. They are going with the latter option.
Yesterday, we told about College Park, Maryland, where illegal immigrants now have the right to vote in the elections. But that’s just the beginning of a much larger trend. We can say with total confidence that letting illegals vote everywhere in all elections will be a mainstream Democratic position within five years if not much sooner. Anyone who opposes it will be called a racist. Bet money on in it.
The dividends in such a strategy are just too obvious.
There are, by the ways, ways to make a DACA compromise that might improve this country. Once given legal status, DREAMers will be eligible to legalize their family members through family reunification, meaning the amnesty will end up covering millions, not just a few hundred thousand. A real DACA compromise would explicitly ban this possibly make it clear that legal status will only be offered to DREAMers and not any of their extended family.
A real DACA compromise should also require that beneficiaries give up citizenship in all other countries. After all, the claim — you’ve heard it a lot — is that they deserve it legalization because America is the only country they know.
But don’t count on any kind of deal like that from the current Republican leadership. As one of our colleagues told us just this morning, when Nancy Pelosi and Paul Ryan sit down to talk immigration, they aren’t opponents negotiating, their allies strategizing.
In the mid-1990s, Congress came close to passing legislation that would have included powerful barriers to illegal immigration and lower levels of legal immigration. Paul Ryan, then a staffer for Sam Brownback of Kansas, wrote a series of letters to other lawmakers that helped kill that bill. There is no reason to believe he has changed at all.
Earlier this year, we had Speaker Ryan on this show and he assured us the House would working hard to fund the border wall. That was a lie, and not the only one the GOP leadership is told its voters.
Nominally, Congress is told by Republicans, but on immigration, Democrats control the agenda. Why is that? Because Paul Ryan and many other corporate Republicans agree with them on every substantial point related to immigration.
President Trump goes along with this because he wants a legislative victory badly and his party is incapable of giving him one. This arrangement cannot last forever. A part of this out of sync with its own voters will collapse and splintered. Republicans don’t have to agree on every policy detail, obviously, but there ought to be some non-negotiable principles at the center of it all.
Borders are real. Citizenship matters. America comes first. If you can’t say any of that with a straight face and mean it and act on it, maybe you are in the wrong party.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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