CHICAGO—Democrats “have made a mistake” of “not standing up for fairness, equality, and inclusion of immigrants” in U.S. society and against the “fear and division” Republicans, led by presidential nominee Donald Trump, says Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, D-Ill., a prominent leader on the issue whose southwestern Chicago congressional district has a high proportion of immigrants.
Garcia offered that criticism at an August 18 session of Progressive Democrats of America, held the day before the party’s national convention, which opened in Chicago. He added the party’s solution—at least under retiring President Joe Biden—has been partial, incomplete, and yielded, in its last attempt, to Republican schemes to demonize migrants, especially those from Latin America.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump “has weaponized immigration into a tool of fear and division,” Garcia said. “The Democrats have the important role of standing up for fairness, equality, and inclusion. But we have fallen into a messaging challenge and possibly a trap” on the inflammatory issue.
Garcia spoke as convention delegates prepared to discuss the party platform, written earlier this year and so far unchanged from when Biden was the party nominee. In the face of party jitters about his ability to beat Trump this year and his ability to govern, given his age, Biden yielded the nomination to his vice president, Kamala Harris.
The party nominated her, the first African-American and South Asian-American woman to gain a major party nomination for the White House.
Early in his administration, Biden put Harris in charge of negotiating with Central American nations about slowing or stopping the flow of migrants northwards through Mexico to cross the U.S.-Mexico border seeking asylum, sometimes caught by hostile—or worse—Border Patrol agents.
The GOP plays to its White nativist base, which waved signs at their convention demanding instant deportation of all 11 million undocumented people in the U.S. It has tried to hang the immigration issue around Harris’s neck, by calling her the “czar” of the issue and blaming her for failure. The Republicans conveniently ignore migration levels have collapsed in the last year.
Didn’t want a Biden win
They also conveniently ignore that several Senate Republicans, led by James Lankford, R-Okla., worked out a “compromise” migration bill with Biden and the Democrats. It was ready to sail through the Senate until Trump torpedoed it. He didn’t want to hand Biden a win.
That “compromise” wasn’t much of a compromise, Garcia said.
It involves “further militarization of” the U.S.-Mexico border, “assaulting our asylum system” to deny hope to deserving people fleeing repression, war and internal chaos, “and more border guards.
“We shouldn’t kid ourselves that this is going to solve the problem…If we continue messaging that that Senate bill is the solution, we will have a real problem” if Harris wins the White House and Democrats take both houses of Congress, he predicted.
That’s because they’ll have boxed themselves into that Senate-passed bill, plus legislation that cleared the House before the Republicans took over two years ago, aiding the Dreamers and another set of “DED”—deferred enforced departure—migrants, many of them from Africa.
“We’ll have a real problem in trying to enact a comprehensive and progressive immigration bill having both reform and re-establishing a fairer asylum system” rather than turning hundreds away, which is Biden’s current policy.
The Democratic platform, however, mimics the “compromise” Trump torched.
“Legislation must secure the border, reform the asylum system, expand legal immigration; and keep families together by supporting long-term undocumented individuals, including Dreamers,” it says, before blasting Trump’s deportation plans.
The Democrats have another problem to tackle, said Erica Andiola, a former Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient who is now an M.D. The DACA recipients are among the Dreamers. She told the progressives Republicans have conditioned people in both parties to think of migrants to the U.S. as numbers, not as real people.
“We are lacking in stories of the humanity of these communities,” Andiola said. Her mother had brought her and several siblings to the U.S., fleeing poverty and strife in the Mexican state of Durango. “But after living here for ten years, ten years ago she and my 17-year-old brother were caught in a raid” by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
“They handcuffed her before my eyes and told her that after ten years, she couldn’t live in this country anymore. If Trump is elected, there will be mass deportations—and the exact same traumatic experience my mother and I had.
“Yet the Democrats push this” legislation “without giving people a sense of the human toll. Let’s push back against Trump’s bullying and make this about people.”
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