The editors of the Wall Street Journal remark on the disorder in Los Angeles and Gov. Newsom’s reaction to it:
So much for moving to the political middle in the culture wars. That’s where California Gov. Gavin Newsom appeared to be heading earlier this year after the Democratic defeat in November. But President Trump’s escalation in migrant deportations has put him in a tight spot with progressive Democrats, and on Tuesday the Governor nominated himself as leader of the anti-Trump resistance.
That’s the clear message from his campaign-like remarks ostensibly aimed at Californians but that sounded like a national rallying cry for Democrats.
Here’s the meat of their observations:
The problem for Mr. Newsom, and all Democrats, is that the Biden Administration so botched the border issue that the public for now is giving Mr. Trump the benefit of the doubt to fix the problem. All the more so when the streets of Los Angeles erupt in protests that turn violent and wave Mexican flags, and Democrats are slow to denounce and quell them.
concluding:
Mr. Trump wants to polarize politics around immigration, and it looks like Mr. Newsom is willing to accept the challenge, or take the bait as the Trump White House would put it. The politics of immigration is about to get worse, if that’s possible. But then Mr. Newsom may not care if his resistance catapults him to the Democratic nomination in 2028.
It probably doesn’t help that the mayor of Los Angeles appears to be intent on fighting the last war. The Supreme Court decided during the Obama Administration that enforcing immigration laws was the responsibility of the federal government. Cities, even sanctuary cities, don’t get to have their own immigration laws. How would her rationale have worked out in Little Rock 60 years ago?
Ruy Teixeira laments the missteps he sees Democrats making:
As the riots in Los Angeles developed, one question kept going through my brain: Have Democrats learned anything?
The chaos in Southern California could have been designed in a lab to exploit Democratic weak spots, combining the issues of illegal immigration, crime, and public disorder. Yet their most visible response to the anti-deportation riots in Los Angeles has been to denounce President Trump for sending National Guard troops to quell the riots. The situation, they insist, is under control—or at least it was, until Trump intervened.
This view is not shared by some in charge of actually doing the quelling.
He quotes the LAPD chief’s saying that the police are overwhelmed by the demonstrators and rioters.
He continues:
There might very well be a universe where it makes sense for Democrats—already saddled with a dreadful image on crime and immigration—to train their fire on Trump and the National Guard instead of anti-deportation rioters. However, it is not the universe we currently inhabit.
and
Democrats do not have to cheer on every ICE raid, but they have to be seen to prioritize law and order and not deny the reality on the ground of violent protests.
Missing from their calculus is how popular many of the president’s policies remain. And that’s especially true on the two issues in question on the streets of L.A.: law and order, and illegal immigration.
His conclusion is:
But what’s unfolding in California should make it glaringly obvious that Democrats aren’t yet ready for a real reckoning with the party’s toxic brand on immigration, crime, and public order and the fight with the party’s left that would inevitably produce. Voters are noticing and will penalize the Democrats accordingly.
In his column in the Washington Post David Ignatius has his own lament:
Democrats have gotten the border issue so wrong, for so long, that it amounts to political malpractice. The latest chapter — in which violent protesters could be helping President Donald Trump create a military confrontation he’s almost begging for as a distraction from his other problems — may prove the most dangerous yet.
When I see activists carrying Mexican flags as they challenge ICE raids in Los Angeles this week, I think of two possibilities: These “protesters” are deliberately working to create visuals that will help Trump, or they are well-meaning but unwise dissenters who are inadvertently accomplishing the same goal.
Democrats’ mistake, over more than a decade, has been to behave as though border enforcement doesn’t matter. Pressured by immigrant rights activists, party leaders too often acted as if maintaining a well-controlled border was somehow morally wrong. Again and again, the short-term political interests of Democratic leaders in responding to a strong faction within the party won out over having a policy that could appeal to the country as a whole.
What worries me is the possibility that someone, somewhere makes a stupid mistake that provokes a national response. It could be here in Chicago. It may not be the Trump Administration. The response could be that anyone who even looks Hispanic is deported. It’s happened before here in the United States.
Update
At The Free Press former Washington Post columnist Charles Lane declaims:
The main argument in favor of a new “grand bargain” is reality. Reality is the same factor that has obliged President Trump, grudgingly, to negotiate with trade partners when his tariffs spooked major U.S. companies and global financial markets. There actually are several realities: First, undocumented workers constitute five percent of the entire workforce. They can’t be replaced just like that. Forty percent of the agricultural labor force is undocumented, along with 15 percent of workers in building and grounds cleaning and maintenance.
Second, it is simply not feasible to deport all of the illegal immigrants, as 84 percent of Republicans want to do, but only 41 percent of independents want to do. ICE arrested 2,300 people nationwide on Thursday—the most arrests it has ever made in one day. At that rate, it would take 465 days to add up to the president’s goal of a million deportations by the end of this year. Even that would be a tiny fraction of the estimated number of illegal immigrants in the U.S.
I think we should recall that the last “grand bargain” on immigration failed because Democrats insisted on normalizing the immigration status of the parents of “DREAMers” as well as the DREAMers themselves. In other words Republicans found anything that could be represented as amnesty politically toxic. I’m confident their position is that much more extreme now.
So, what would a grand bargain on immigration look like? Regardless of reality I don’t think such a thing is possible now.
Let me repeat my own view. I think we should have more legal immigration including low-skill workers and a lot less illegal immigration. Regardless of the letter following the name of whoever is president we should enforce our laws as written energetically, regardless of personal preference. I think that eVerify should be fully implemented to facilitate workplace-level enforcement. There should be serious consequences for employers who knowingly hire people in the country illegally.