Locator: 48681IMMIGRATION.
At the Democratic debates in June–July 2019, when candidates were asked
if they would decriminalize illegal border crossings (making them a
civil, rather than criminal, offense), all but one candidate on stage
raised their hands. That exception was Colorado Senator Michael Bennet,
who did not support decriminalizing such crossings and kept his hand
down. -- AI.
Must-read article.
Article by Lisa Lerer, Jazmine Ulloa and Reid J. Epstein.The lede:
The Democrats onstage saw themselves as morally courageous. American voters, it turned out, saw a group of politicians hopelessly out of touch.
Standing side by side at a primary debate in June 2019, nine of the party’s candidates for president were asked to raise their hand if they wanted to decriminalize illegal border crossings. Only one of them held still.
Six years later, the party remains haunted by that tableau. It stands both as a vivid demonstration of a leftward policy shift on immigration that many prominent Democratic lawmakers and strategists now say they deeply regret, and as a marker of how sharply the country was moving in the other direction.
Last year, 55 percent of Americans told Gallup that they supported a decrease in immigration, nearly twice as many as in 2020, and the first time since 2005 that a majority had said so. The embrace of a more punitive approach to illegal immigration includes not only white voters but also working-class Latinos, whose support Democrats had long courted with liberal border policies.
