Democrats vs. Democracy?

One disappointing detail of last night's Dartmouth debate was the unanimous endorsement of the concept of "sanctuary cities" for illegal immigrants. All the aspirants for the Democratic nomination at once put themselves at odds with what seems to be the majority opinion in this country. I'm willing to concede that they take their position as a matter of principle. Many people do believe that the poor of the world have an inalienable right to go wherever they need to in order to make a living for themselves and provide for their families. It is a bias of modern "liberal" or "progressive" thinking that the poor are always right. As President of the United States, however, your constituency is not the wretched of the earth or its huddled masses. Your job is to execute faithfully the laws of the United States, which in theory represent the will of the people who made you President. Nothing stops you from going through the proper channels to change the law if you think it unjust. But the President cannot actively resist or encourage resistance to federal laws. Whenever we get even a whiff of George W. Bush doing something similar, a bunch of us cry impeachment. How would you like to have Tom Tancredo or some other anti-immigrant hardliner introduce an impeachment resolution if President Democrat fails to crack down on the sanctuary cities? It's the same general principle.

Leaving the virtues of immigration aside, the Democrats are missing an opportunity to exploit a growing national consensus. We know that a lot of people oppose both the Iraq War and anything resembling "amnesty" for illegal immigrants. A lot of liberals find it hard to conceive that anyone could hold those two thoughts simultaneously, but the evidence is out there. Liberals may disagree about immigration, but they need to appreciate a larger truth if they want any chance of victory next year. They need to understand that Americans are sick of seeing people get away with stuff. They see it happening at the highest and lowest levels of society. They see it in the Bush Administration. They see it on the border. They see it all around them. They see themselves as law-abiding, players by the rules, and they feel certain that they would not be allowed to get away with much of anything. The anger they feel is an emotion that conservatives contemptuously call "envy," but liberals and Democrats can't even come up with a word for it. Some call it "populism," but that term has too many contradictory connotations to be useful. The person who can give this feeling a proper name, and thus name a movement, might go a long way toward empowering multitudes in this country. An institution known as the Democratic Party might seem to have an advantage in any contest to reach these people, but the self-styled Democrats of 2007 seem handicapped instead. Whether ideology or the pathologies of the American Bipolarchy are to blame is a question for another time.

On an individual note, I must emphasize that I don't share widespread fears about unassimilable immigrant hordes, and am willing to see quotas for legal entry increased for Mexicans and other Central Americans to reflect realities of immigration trends. For me, this is a rule of law issue that puts the sovereignty of the American people at stake. We cease to be a sovereign nation if we cannot set conditions for the entry of newcomers. It sounds very pious and progressive to say "No One is Illegal," but as long as we are not all one world and one government, the people of each nation have the right to stigmatize newcomers as illegal aliens. That doesn't mean we can't strive to create one world and one government, but we can't live and act as if we're there already when we're not. In another context, that would be called unilateral disarmament.