Among the crowded field of 2020 Democrat presidential primary candidates, two of the field’s most anti-establishment Democrats have bucked the open borders lobby.
Former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and 2020 Democrat candidate Julian Castro has successfully pushed a number of presidential primary candidates into supporting not only more legal immigration to the U.S., but free taxpayer-funded healthcare for illegal aliens, and a border policy that decriminalizes all immigration.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has embraced an economic patriotism platform while taking some of the most far-left immigration positions in the primary. Her platform now includes decriminalizing illegal border crossings, free healthcare for all 11 to 22 million illegal aliens, an increase in legal immigration levels to import more foreign competition for American workers, and a 700 percent increase in the total number of refugees arriving in the country.
Likewise, former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) have embraced plans to provide free healthcare for illegal aliens that American taxpayers would be forced to pay for.
Bucking the open borders wing lobby, which has had an increasingly significant influence on the Democrat Party since the mid-2000s, in small yet noteworthy ways are Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) and businessman Andrew Yang.
Gabbard, despite supporting amnesty for the entire illegal population in the U.S., firmly said in the second Democrat debate her plan for tuition-free college would not be available to illegal aliens.
“Senator [Bernie] Sanders believes college should be tuition-free for undocumented immigrants as well, do you?” CNN anchor Don Lemon asked.
“I don’t,” Gabbard responded.
Similarly, Yang told Breitbart News in Iowa last week that his central campaign promise to establish Universal Basic Income (UBI) would only be available to American citizens. The UBI plan, Yang says, is cheaper than the country’s current welfare system and would give $1,000 a month to every American citizen, allowing them to spend the money however they want in the U.S. economy.
“Mr. Yang, does the thousand dollars a month go to people who are in the country illegally as well?” Breitbart News asked.
“It goes to citizens,” Yang said. “So it would not go to undocumented immigrants.”
As Breitbart News has chronicled, the effort to institute the Democrat Party as the party of mass illegal and legal immigration is hugely unpopular among the American electorate and is being driven almost exclusively by white liberals grappling with “white guilt,” academic analysis has found.
For example, the latest Harvard/Harris Poll found that 69 percent of swing voters, as well as 64 percent of all U.S. voters, said they are somewhat unlikely or very unlikely to support a 2020 presidential candidate who supports opening the U.S.-Mexico border to more illegal and legal immigration.
Even self-described “moderate Democrat” voters, by a majority, said they are turned off by the Democrat Party’s rapid shift towards an open borders platform.
The latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll shows that a plurality of moderate Democrats oppose providing illegal aliens with free health care, and nearly six-in-ten moderate Democrats oppose decriminalizing illegal immigration as a number of 2020 Democrat candidates have proposed.
Providing free healthcare to illegal aliens in the U.S. would cost American taxpayers an additional $660 billion in costs every decade, or about $66 billion a year, Breitbart News analysis has discovered.
The Washington, DC-imposed mass immigration policy — whereby more than 1.5 million mostly low-skilled foreign workers are admitted to the U.S. to compete against Americans every year — has been a boon to corporate executives, Wall Street, big business, and multinational conglomerates, as every one percent increase in the immigrant composition of an occupation’s labor force reduces Americans’ hourly wages by 0.4 percent. Every one percent increase in the immigrant workforce reduces Americans’ overall wages by 0.8 percent.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.