By Hank Beckman –
Somewhere, most likely in a place in dire need of air conditioning and one gigantic sprinkler system, Saul Alinsky must be smiling ruefully.
He certainly wouldn’t approve of the policies of Donald John Trump, but he would have to have a grudging admiration for how well the former real estate developer and reality show host recently utilized the radical Chicago organizer’s own fourth rule of tactics: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.
In Rules for Radicals, Alinsky’s seminal 1971 book that became a primer for radical leftists everywhere—published around the same time he was mentoring a young Hillary Rodham—he reasoned that no enemy could live up to its own standards, any more than “the Christian church can live up to Christianity.”
Smart move. All human beings are fallible and to expect them to always live up to their stated principles, however passionate they may be about them, will almost always end in bitter disappointment.
So liberals everywhere will surely be disappointed to learn that some of their political heroes are not quite the categorical supporters of sanctuary spaces for illegals that they’ve led us to believe.
President Trump has gone full Alinsky by floating the idea of transporting illegals, including asylum-seekers and any other gate-crashers, to cities that have enacted policies or laws protecting illegals from the federal government.
Estimates vary, but there are as many as 200 sanctuary cities in the country. The policies they follow with regards to illegals also vary, but the goal is always the same—to refuse or limit cooperation with the federal government in enforcing immigrations laws, particularly as it involves deporting illegals.
U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is positively aghast that the president would consider such a dastardly act.
“This is just another notion that is unworthy of the President of the United States,” she said at a press conference. An aide later quoted a statement from Pelosi saying, “Using human beings—including children—as pawns in their warped game to perpetuate fear and demonize immigrants is despicable and, in some cases, criminal.”
California Governor Gavin Newsom sounded like a fourth-grader reciting declarative sentences in his English class.
“It is illegal,” he was quoted as saying about Trump's immigration effort in the Los Angeles Times. “It is immoral. It is unethical. It is sophomoric. It is petulant. And it is par for the course.”
Some, including Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney, were savvy enough to stress that their cities welcomed illegals, but even Kenney said the proposal showed the “utter contempt the Trump administration has for basic human dignity.”
Sorry, but this sudden outrage at the prospect of more illegals in cities whose leaders promised sanctuary for them is more than a little hard to take.
For the entire Trump presidency, and for a long time before that, we’ve been assured by liberals that all illegals are the salt of the earth, people who only want to take part in this great experiment we call the United States of America. They only want their families to escape the violence, the grinding poverty, and the lack of economic opportunity in their home countries.
We’ve been repeatedly assured by liberals that not only are illegals not harmful to our economy, but that our country will suffer without their unique talents. It’s never actually explained how they can be so categorically beneficial to our economy when they seemed to have so little effect on their native countries. Why is it that Honduras doesn’t benefit from all this human capital?
And not only are these noble immigrants not responsible for increased crime, they somehow magically reduce levels of crime all around the country. That seems a little hard to reconcile with some estimates from the Department of Homeland Security showing the opposite, not to mention the trouble Fairfax County, Virginia and towns on Long Island are having with MS-13. But again, we’ll just have to take the left’s word for it; they’d never mislead us.
And if you don’t agree with the standard leftist line on illegals, you are demonized as a hater, a bigot, or worse. Supporters of tougher border enforcement have been compared to Nazis so routinely the last two years that it’s no longer even noteworthy.
So why on earth would the leaders of cities where illegals are already, well, not really illegal, balk at taking advantage of the benefits that more illegals would surely bring?
Of course, they do want to reap those benefits. They want more immigrants who tend to vote Democratic. Even if illegals can’t currently vote in national elections, one Congress or another will eventually grant them amnesty. And many municipalities have plans to let them vote in local elections.
Another plus for Democrats is that most studies show that immigrants, both legal and illegal, consume more government benefits and services than native-born citizens. The people who usually administer those benefits and services are often members of public sector unions. Those unions overwhelmingly make their political donations to the Democratic Party. Why kill that cash cow?
But open borders Democrats are not omnipotent. They still have constituents upon whose votes they depend to keep their jobs. And many of these voters, of all races, are in favor of stricter immigration enforcement.
It’s one thing to convince voters to accommodate illegals already here. But many voters aren’t thrilled about the prospect of importing thousands more low-skilled illegals to compete with the native-born for jobs and other scarce resources.
The president has basically said, “OK, you don’t want to help me fix border security? You’d rather create sanctuary communities to protect illegals and flaunt federal law? Well, here’s your chance to walk it like you talk it.”
Saul Alinsky himself couldn’t have played it any better.
