Providing amnesty to illegal aliens registered with the Obama administration’s now-defunct Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) should not be a political priority, said Dale Wilcox, Executive Director & General Counsel for the Immigration Reform Law Institute.
Wilcox made his comments on Thursday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight in an interview with co-hosts Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak.
Capitol Hill’s prioritization of DACA and extending amnesty to its registrants and other illegal aliens is a mistake, said Wilcox.
“There is no urgency regarding DACA,” said Wilcox. “You hear people losing their minds, ‘What are we going to do? It’s going to end March 5.’ This an arbitrary date; it was an unconstitutional program in the first place. The people’s representatives in Congress have rejected DACA-like legislation, the so-called Dream Act, 24 times since 2001. I would calm everybody down. There is no need to deal with this. We’re talking about illegal aliens who are not supposed to be here in the first place. This is amnesty.”
Pollak and Wilcox shared their skepticism of the likelihood of bipartisan agreement on legislative immigration reform measures.
“The two sides are just not willing to find any agreement, and there may be no possible agreement,” said Pollak. “A zone of potential agreement does not exist between the two sides.”
Democrats seek to frame immigration reform — including amnesty and border security — as a wedge issue in 2018 midterm elections, said Pollak. Such a political strategy, he added, would damage Democrats’ political fortunes given the unpopularity of their positions.
“Democrats now have essentially ensured that this is going to be an issue for November and not for March 5,” said Pollak:
Democrats have openly advocated for more amnesty, and their poll numbers have plummeted, and that’s maybe not the entire explanation for why they’ve fallen — there’s also the tax cuts, and so forth, but those haven’t really kicked in, yet. You’d have to think that Trump’s on pretty solid footing here because, even though his bill didn’t get through, the country likes Democrats’ ideas even less. … What Trump did was show that Democrats won’t take yes for an answer. … I think if Democrats try to take this issue to the polls in November, they’re going to lose.
“Harming Americans to assist illegal aliens,” is politically unwise, said Wilcox, crediting Democrats with the “government shutdown” in late January.
Breitbart News Tonight airs Monday through Friday on SiriusXM’s Patriot channel 125 from 9:00 p.m. to midnight Eastern (6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Pacific).
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Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.
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