An Oregon Democrat believes that the fight for amnesty for illegal immigrants is the “civil rights battle” for millennials that will decide who controls the the country for the next three decades.
“Immigration reform is probably the biggest issue of the 21st century,” Rep. Kurt Schrader (D-OR) reportedly said at an “Immigration Day Action” event this weekend. “It will decide who is in charge of this country for the next 20 or 30 years.”
According to the Portland Tribune, Schrader made his remarks at an event that was sponsored by Causa, a prominent Oregon pro-amnesty group, and he compared today’s amnesty fight to the civil and voting rights movements in the 1960s, saying the amnesty movement is “the civil rights battle for the younger generation.”
“They, too, had a different background — different ethnicity, different race — and yet they had rights to participate in this country of ours that had been denied them,” he reportedly told the gathering at Chemeketa Community College. “This is what is at stake now for a lot of you and your families. I feel a kinship and a need to support all people who had an opportunity to come to this great country.”
As Breitbart News has emphasized, though, “the civil rights movement of the 1960s was about ensuring that black Americans received all of the rights they were due as citizens of the United States while today’s pro-amnesty movement is about demanding full rights for non-citizens who entered the country illegally.”
Oregonians for Immigration Reform, which has opposed Obama’s executive amnesty, acknowledged that “immigration built the foundation and wove the fabric of our sovereign nation,” but emphasized that it “is concerned about the utter disregard for existing United States immigration laws.”
“A sovereign American nation has both the right and the responsibility to limit immigration and control its borders,” the group reportedly said.
The White House on Monday asked for a stay of a federal judge’s injunction against Obama’s executive amnesty while it readies its appeal. Judge Andrew Hanen last week issued an injunction after a majority of states sued the Obama administration over its executive amnesty. As the Tribune noted, though, Oregon, whose progressive voters overwhelmingly rejected driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants last November, was not one of those states. Oregon actually joined 11 other states and Washington, D.C. to file a brief in support of Obama’s executive amnesty.
Schrader also predicted that since “Republicans are desperate” to get Hispanic votes, they would soften their position on comprehensive amnesty legislation. But as Breitbart News detailed, an Eagle Forum report last year “concluded that massive amnesty legislation would be ‘suicide'” for the conservative movement and the Republican Party:
As Eagle Forum President Phyllis Schlafly noted, although “a Harris poll found that 81% of native-born Americans believe schools should teach patriotism,” 50% of recent immigrants do not want their children to be “taught to be proud of America.” Schlafly said that means new immigrants will be offended when conservatives emphasize patriotism and assimilation.
The Eagle Forum report concluded that, though “Republican outreach to Asian and Latino voters” is “critical,” Republicans “can never turn liberal-leaning immigrants and their adult children into supporters of limited government faster than the current high level of legal immigration (one million a year) is bringing in new liberal voters.” The report found that new immigrants “and their adult children are significantly more liberal than the average American voter on a host of policy issues, including the size of government, Obamacare, affirmative action, gun control, greater environmental regulation, and other issues championed by the Left.
Calls to legalize illegal immigrants, whom Americans opposed to amnesty have referred to as “undocumented Democrats,” also turn off white working-class voters. As Democrats noted in their autopsy report of the 2014 midterm elections, which curiously did not mention the impact that Obama’s proposed executive amnesty had in giving Republicans back control of Congress, white working-class voters have been abandoning the party.
“In order to win elections, the Democratic Party must reclaim voters that we’ve lost including white Southern voters, excite key constituencies such as African American women and Latinas, and mobilize the broadest coalition of voters possible to not only recapture state houses but also Congress,” the report concluded. “In order to better understand how to bring this large coalition together, the Task Force recommends — in tandem with the National Narrative Project — that the DNC’s research delve more deeply into the barriers that keep people from identifying with, and supporting, Democratic candidates. This also includes working to better understand drop off and independent voters.”
If white-working class voters continue to abandon Democrats en masse because of issues like amnesty, the party will need new voters to replace them. Perhaps that is why Democrats have gone all-in on Obama’s executive amnesty–even uniting to filibuster the House’s Homeland Security funding bill over it–and comprehensive amnesty legislation.