Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is confounding the Left by expressing an opinion that an open border immigration policy would “make everybody in America poorer”:
“You’re doing away with the concept of a nation state,” Sanders said, “and I don’t think there’s any country in the world that believes in that.”
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On Thursday, Sanders was grilled about the comments on MSNBC by anchor Alex Seitz-Wald. No doubt, Sanders views on the issue of immigration seemed off the current left-wing script, where the immediate acceptance of all hopeful immigrants to this nation is a matter of moral urgency.
Sanders’ interviewer for Vox even couched the issue as a moral responsibility we have to people all over the world. The fact that an open borders immigration policy would make foreigners better off economically was itself an argument for the policy.
Sanders responded, “I think from a moral responsibility we’ve got to work with the rest of the industrialized world to address the problems of international poverty, but you don’t do that by making people in this country even poorer.”
The exchange, and especially the shocked reaction to it, goes a long way to explain how out of step Sanders is with today’s left-wing activists. That a multi-decade democrat socialist activist finds himself on the conservative wing of his party on a major policy issue probably says more about the lurch of the party, though.
Although, to be fair, Sanders also did claim that open border policy is a “right wing proposal” backed by the “Koch brothers.”
Also, it should be noted that this position isn’t new from Sanders. However, it is receiving renewed attention due to his presidential run.
