Republicans screech that Obama opened the borders to immigrants. They use the fear of dirty, disease-ridden, terrorist-loving "illegals" to fire up their old white base and stoke apocalyptic fears of being demographically swamped by younger, browner immigrants who will end up voting Democratic as a bloc.
In a long interview with Ezra Klein on Vox, Bernie Sanders makes some paradigm-shaking comments on immigration that turn this narrative upside down:
Ezra Klein: You said being a democratic socialist means a more international view. I think if you take global poverty that seriously, it leads you to conclusions that in the US are considered out of political bounds. Things like sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders. About sharply increasing ...
Bernie Sanders: Open borders? No, that's a Koch brothers proposal.... That's a right-wing proposal, which says essentially there is no United States....
Ezra Klein: It would make a lot of global poor richer, wouldn't it?
Bernie Sanders: It would make everybody in America poorer —you're doing away with the concept of a nation state, and I don't think there's any country in the world that believes in that. If you believe in a nation state or in a country called the United States or UK or Denmark or any other country, you have an obligation in my view to do everything we can to help poor people. What right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don't believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country, I think we have to do everything we can to create millions of jobs.
You know what youth unemployment is in the United States of America today? If you're a white high school graduate, it's 33 percent, Hispanic 36 percent, African American 51 percent. You think we should open the borders and bring in a lot of low-wage workers, or do you think maybe we should try to get jobs for those kids?
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.
Ezra Klein: Then what are the responsibilities that we have?... How do you think about what the foreign aid budget should be? How do you think about poverty abroad?
Bernie Sanders: ... As a United States senator in Vermont, my first obligation is to make certain kids in my state and kids all over this country have the ability to go to college, which is why I am supporting tuition-free public colleges and universities. I believe we should create millions of jobs rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and ask the wealthiest people in this country to start paying their fair share of taxes. I believe we should raise the minimum wage to at least 15 bucks an hour so people in this county are not living in poverty. I think we end the disgrace of some 20 percent of our kids living in poverty in America....
The other thing that you understand globally is a horrendous imbalance in terms of wealth in the world. As I mentioned earlier, the top 1 percent will own more than the bottom 99 percent in a year or so....
But I think what we need to be doing as a global economy is making sure that people in poor countries have decent-paying jobs, have education, have health care, have nutrition for their people. That is a moral responsibility, but you don't do that, as some would suggest, by lowering the standard of American workers, which has already gone down very significantly.
Like Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders supports comprehensive immigration reform, including a path to citizenship, and until that happens, relief from the more draconian realities of detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants.
But unlike Hillary, and for that matter President Obama, he refuses to accept the dishonest framing of the issue that Republicans and the media promote.
It's the right wing, the billionaires, and the economic elite who are blocking immigration reform and who support the current disgraceful exploitation of the undocumented for their own enrichment.
Even the most immigration-reform-friendly of the GOP candidates, Jeb Bush, can hardly bring himself to say more than "We eat Mexican food at home" when asked about his views on the subject, but that he doesn't support a path to citizenship, just a second-class legal status for useful low-paid workers.
Bernie places the blame for the current exploitative system directly where it belongs.