Andrew Sullivan on the Democrats and immigration

I enjoy reading Andrew Sullivan’s weekly “Interesting Times” columns, and they’re worth following. Each Friday column covers three subjects, and although I don’t agree with Andrew all of the time, more often than not I do. You may still count him as a conservative, but he sure doesn’t sound like one, especially when, as he does this week, he goes after Trump and his mendacity. But I want to highlight the third of Sullivan’s mini-articles this week: the one on immigration. Click on the screenshot to read.

First, though, a few excerpts from the other two bits.

On Trump and his lying:

No, Trump’s only rival in this department — denying what everyone can see is true — was Sarah Palin, the lipsticked John the Baptist of the Trump cult. During the 2008 campaign, gobsmacked that this lunatic could be in line for the presidency, I began to keep track of everything she said out loud that was provably, empirically untrue. In the two months she was running to be vice-president, I catalogued 34 demonstrably untrue statements, which she refused to correct. She compiled nowhere near Trump’s volume of lies — it’s close to inhuman to lie the way he does — but her capacity to move swiftly on from them, along with the press’s supine failure to keep up, was very Trumpy. The short attention span of digital media has made this worse. And she got away with it. The base didn’t care; the media couldn’t cope.

Trump, too stupid to ape Clinton, and far more accomplished a liar than Palin, combines the sinister Bush-era kind of lie — “We do not torture” — with the Palin compulsion to just make things up all the time to avoid any sense of vulnerability. What Trump adds is a level of salesmanship that is truly a wonder to behold. He is a con man of surpassing brilliance and conviction, and every time he survives the fallout of a con, he gets more confident about the next one.

At some point, the law usually catches up with this kind of con artist, and Trump has had quite a few close calls over the years (and paid out a lot in settlements). But a presidential con man at this level of talent, legitimized by public opinion, enlarged and enhanced by the office and its trappings, is far harder to catch. It seems to me we had one shot of doing this definitively —the Mueller investigation — and we failed.

On Boris Johnson.  Sullivan agrees with many that the risible Boris Johnson is about to become Britain’s next Prime Minister. So now Brits get their own orange clown! Sullivan recounts how he knew Johnson—they were both presidents of the Oxford Union, a debating society—and Sullivan avers that he still likes Johnson. Why? I guess because he finds Johnson entertaining and “great company”, though he can’t take Johnson seriously. And, although he doesn’t share Johnson’s pro-Brexit stand, he can’t manage to rouse the usual Sullivanish opprobrium against his old mate. He concludes this way:

[Johnson’s] support for Brexit was a critical moment in the credibility of the Leave campaign. It’s not a huge leap to say that without him, it might not have happened.

And that’s why the impossible conundrum of Brexit is now rightly in his ample lap. Unlike May, he voted for it (or said he did). Panicked by the rise of the Brexit party, the Tories believe he will bring the faithful back and get out of the E.U. definitively by Halloween — even though there is no parliamentary majority for it, and if Boris thinks he will have more luck negotiating a better deal with the E.U., he’s crackers. You think Macron will go easier on Boris than May?

He once said, with characteristic brio, that “my chances of being PM are about as good as the chances of finding Elvis on Mars, or my being reincarnated as an olive.” That was as colorful as it was untrue. But there is some sweet cosmic justice in Boris having to take responsibility for the Brexit he backed. It may be a catastrophe, but it will be his, and, for him at least, it sure will be fun.

On immigration.  Nearly everyone agrees that we now have an immigration crisis on our hands. Republicans try to solve it by flailing about, sometimes proposing cruel solutions and sometimes stupid ones. But Democrats—my side—seem to ignore the whole mess. As I’ve said before, one might think, by listening to Dem party leaders, that they favor open borders.  Now they really don’t, but a big failure of the Democrats is their failure to propose and unify behind a sensible immigration policy. A failure to do that will be a big minus for us in next year’s elections.

We all know that many immigrants aren’t coming as political refugees or refugees from violence, but pretend to do so because it guarantees them entry. If there’s one thing most of us agree on, it’s that true refugees deserve pride of place in immigration, while “economic refugees”—those who come here simply to attain a better life, have to take a back seat. And most of us agree that we simply can’t let everyone in, unless perhaps you’re an extreme Democratic Socialist.

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, notes Sullivan, defines “refugee status” this way:

“Refugee status or asylum may be granted to people who have been persecuted or fear they will be persecuted on account of race, religion, nationality, and/or membership in a particular social group or political opinion.”

In his piece, Sullivan, who used to be on the board of an organization that helped gay couples gain asylum because they were persecuted in their home countries, draws this distinction, using as his centerpiece the story of a Guatemalan coffee-bean farmer who is planning to claim asylum in the U.S. because the price of coffee has dropped and he’s losing money.

I agree with Sullivan that if we’re going to abide by American principles, we must first of all be a haven for those persecuted in other lands. After that we can look at non-persecution claims. But the Democrats don’t seem to be doing much about anything, and, given the sentiment of the country, they simply must propose some reasonable way to vet those who want to move here.

Sullivan:

Sympathizing with people whose livelihoods have vanished is entirely the moral thing to do. But unemployment and poverty are not the same as persecution, and the migration is self-evidently economic. Nonetheless, Sieff’s central figure in the story is going to claim asylum when he reaches the border. In other words, the generosity of America in providing asylum for the persecuted is being fraudulently exploited by hundreds of thousands of immigrants.

An asylum claim is not immediately granted, of course, but it is an immediate guarantee of entry to America, because we recognize that people genuinely seeking asylum need refuge immediately. But that’s not what’s happening here. The current crisis in immigration is, in fact, a giant and flagrant abuse of the very meaning of asylum. Just as illegal immigration is an affront to legal immigration, so blatantly fraudulent asylum pleas trivialize and exploit those who genuinely need our help.

I have yet to see or hear any Democratic candidate object in any way to this abuse. As core principles of American law and decency are openly flaunted, they really, really don’t seem to give a damn.

No, they don’t.