Rep. Jason Lewis: My Democrat Opponent Is ‘Going Down the Open Borders Route’

Rep. Jason Lewis (R-MN), who is up for re-election to represent Minnesota’s 2nd Congressional District in November, described his Democrat challenger Angie Craig as allied with “open borders” leftists. He offered his remarks in a Wednesday interview with Breitbart News’s Dylan Gwinn on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily.

Lewis said his opponent expressed support for former President Barack Obama’s “amnesty order.”

“She is not saying [she supports open borders] openly because she can’t in a swing district, and she knows that,” said Lewis. “but recall that when my predecessor John Kline was still in office and she decided to run early on then, she said the reason she was running is because he was opposed to the Obama amnesty order. So she’s got a sort of track record here of going down the open borders route.”

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Lewis noted Craig’s opposition to a southern border wall to advance national security.

“She said in our debate the other day she’s absolutely opposed to a wall,” remarked Lewis. “She’s taking money from Kirsten Gillibrand who is a leading advocate of abolishing ICE. So the distinction’s pretty clear when it comes to immigration between Angie and myself.”

Lewis described the status quo of illegal immigration and contemporary immigration and refugee admission laws as existential threats to American society.

“It goes back to one last remnant of the 1960s,” explained Lewis. “That’s when so-called immigration reform laws really started to kick in, and we sort of overthrew 100 years of jurisprudence on the idea that we’re a sovereign nation. We can’t provide to the rest of the globe, and we’re the last best hope of mankind on Earth — that shining city on a hill. [America] has to maintain its own internal integrity.”

Lewis added, “In the 1960s, [we] started to change the law, then you have the advent of the great society and modern welfare state, and it’s sort of led to this tipping point where you combine that with sanctuary cities [and] a trillion dollars of benefits a year, and what you have are people not coming to any other country.”

Lewis went on, “That’s really the fundamental question people have to ask: Why are they coming to America? Why are they coming to California? Why aren’t they staying in Mexico?”

The modern welfare state is “magnet” for illegal immigration, said Lewis.

“We adopted a policy [of] what some insurance actuarials call a moral hazard,” said Lewis. “When you induce the behavior you really might not want to induce, you overinsure by basically saying, ‘Come here.'”

Lewis added, “The citizenship clause and the Plyler decision in 1982 — where you have to provide free education for illegals — [and the] Family Medical Leave Act — where you have to provide them healthcare — we put out a magnet, and the fact of the matter is we just can’t sustain it as a nation, as a society, or fiscally.

Lewis concluded, “That’s sort of where we are. We’ve come to the point now in this election where it’s about Kavanaugh, caravans, and chaos. That’s it, in a nutshell.”

Lewis described the 2016 presidential election as the beginning of a national political realignment, with Republicans yielding greater support from unionized private sector laborers.

“The Trump presidency has brought about a political realignment from private sector labor — certainly not the public sector unions, and that’s all the Democrats seem to care about, these days, AFSCME and the AFL-CIO and those folks,” assessed Lewis.

Contemporary left-wing politics are alienating private sector laborer, said Lewis.

Lewis continued, “Take a look at the carpenter’s union which was endorsed me, local operating engineers …. that realignment up north, the Enbridge pipeline or mining and manufacturing coming back on the Iron Range, that private sector labor realignment has sort of put the Democrats in a quandary, because they’re not appealing to those folks, they’re overreaching on sort of this radical chic leftism that those folks don’t recognize. Well, actually they do recognize it. They recognize it from the 60s. … It doesn’t speak to their lives.”

Republicans have growing opportunities to gain support in Minnesota, according to Lewis.

“Remember Trump only lost Minnesota by one and a half percentage points. Yes, St. Paul is very blue like other urban areas, but the state outside of that is pretty red, and you look at Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Trump took those, and Minnesota is next in line. I think the realignment is real and it doesn’t speak to their concerns, this radicalism on the left.”

Lewis cast the upcoming midterms as a referendum on the idea of America.

“Everybody needs to step up and do their duty for their country,” advised Lewis. “The best way you can do that is to vote. If we go backwards, and it’s not just the fiscal aspect, it’s on the cultural aspect, it’s on the governance aspect, is on everything we define as the American experiment.”

Lewis warned of what a Democrat majority in the House would look like.

“If you have Nancy Pelosi as speaker and Adam Schiff as head of intel and Jerome Nadler heading the [House Judiciary Committee] and Maxine Waters as head of the Financial Services Committee, where do you think the country is going to head? It’s going to veer portside in a dramatic and very dangerous fashion, and I don’t think the country is ready for that.”

Lewis concluded, “Literally, you’ve got a party advocating a constitutional crisis. It’s a constitutional crisis if they take over. … That is almost the height of political malpractice”

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