Immigration opens another divide for 2020 Democrats

Bloomberg

Calls by some top Democratic presidential contenders to decriminalise border crossings have divided the party and risk turning the issue of immigration into one that President Donald Trump eagerly exploits during his 2020 re-election bid.
Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris are among the leading candidates who’d make illegally crossing the border a civil rather than a criminal offense. On that point they’re at odds with front-runner Joe Biden and several other centrist contenders, some of whom warn that Democrats are handing Trump a gift.
The opposing viewpoints were on display during last week’s Democratic forums in Detroit.
“If a mother and a child walk thousands of miles on a dangerous path, in my view, they are not criminals,” Sanders of Vermont said on the first night of the debates. The following night Biden, the former vice president, said that, “If you cross the border illegally, you should be able to be sent back. It’s a crime.”
Democrats have hoped to use Trump’s harsh immigration policies against him as the backlash grows against the treatment of families at the border and potential raids in interior states to round up undocumented immigrants. But most voters are cool to the idea of decriminalisation, and Trump could use the issue to brand all Democrats as “soft on crime” and favoring “open borders.”

Central to Appeal
A promise to stem illegal immigration and tighten US borders was central to Trump’s appeal in 2016. The president’s actions in office, including diverting Pentagon money to build his promised wall on the US-Mexico frontier, separating parents and children in border detention facilities, and banning travel to the US from several majority-Muslim nations, have kept the issue on the front burner.
In a Gallup survey taken in July, 23 percent of Americans surveyed said that immigration is the most important problem facing the country, the highest percentage since the polling group first measured the issue in 1993.
“The greatest betrayal committed by the Democrats is their support for open borders,” Trump told the crowd at a rally in Cincinnati.
“And these open borders would overwhelm schools and hospitals, drain public services and flood communities with poisonous drugs.”
Joe Trippi, a veteran of Democratic presidential campaigns who isn’t aligned with any of the current candidates, said there are clear divisions within the party about the wisdom of pushing to decriminalise border crossings by undocumented migrants.
“There’s no position you can take that would not have Trump making that attack,” he said. “The question is what seems reasonable and right to the American people.”
There are other significant issues dividing Democrats — including Medicare for All and the Green New Deal — but few are as widely unpopular as decriminalising border crossings.
A July 15-17 NPR/PBSNewsHouse/Marist Poll found that 66 percent of Americans think it’s a bad idea, and just 27 percent support it.
Even among Democrats a minority — 47 percent — supported it, while 87 percent of Republicans were opposed.
White House hopeful Julian Castro raised it during the first round of Democratic debates in June, calling for repealing a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act that allows crossing the US border illegally to be prosecuted as a misdemeanor, punishable with up to six months in prison.
That’s enabled the separation of families at the border as the Trump administration prosecutes migrant parents crossing with their children, who are put in the hands of civil immigration authorities.
At the latest debates, Castro, Warren of Massachusetts and three other candidates — California’s Harris, Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York — took the strongest positions for decriminalising border crossings. Booker said if cases were moved through civil courts,
“You won’t need these awful detention facilities that I have been to; seeing children sleeping on pavement, people being put in cages, nursing mothers, small children.”