tags: Press Releases

For the GOP, Problems are More Useful Than Solutions On Immigration and the Border

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Pete Buttigieg Calls Out GOP Game, While President Obama, Beto O’Rourke, Gavin Newsome and Rep. Veronica Escobar Condemn Dangers of GOP Embrace of Anti-Immigrant Ugliness

Washington, DC – While commentators and polling highlight the backlash to Gov. Ron Desantis’ cruel political stunt, several leading Democratic observers are broadening their criticism to highlight the larger dangers of preferring political stunts to real solutions on immigration issues: 

  • Former President Barack Obama speaking at a San Diego conference: “When you have that kind of rhetoric floating around out there, we’ve seen in history that is dangerous rhetoric”: As the San Diego Union-Tribune reported, President Obama said: “Right now, the biggest fuel behind the Republican agenda is related to immigration and the fear that somehow America’s character is going to be changed if, people of darker shades, there are too many of them here … You hear it on hard-right media, you hear it from candidates and politicians, you hear things like ‘great replacement theory’ — I mean, this is not subtle … A lot of toxic rhetoric in the atmosphere that characterizes ‘those people’ as ‘different’ and wanting to ‘tear down America’ as opposed to build it up … When you have that kind of rhetoric floating around out there, we’ve seen in history that is dangerous rhetoric. It’s dangerous wherever it appears and it’s dangerous here in the United States. It’s not part of what’s best in us; it’s not part of what makes this country exceptional.”
  • U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg at the Texas Tribune festival describes Ron DeSantis and Republicans’ immigration stunts: “It’s one thing to call attention to the problem when you have a course of action … it’s another to just call attention to a problem because the problem is more useful to you than the solution”: Speaking on a panel at the annual Texas Tribune festival, Secretary Buttigieg stated: “Obviously there are issues with the border and migration. But these are the kinds of stunts you see from people when you don’t have a solution … It’s one thing to call attention to the problem when you have a course of action … it’s another to just call attention to a problem because the problem is more useful to you than the solution and that helps call attention to yourself… Human beings are being impacted. You flee a communist regime in Venezuela, you come here, and then somebody tricks you … it’s not just ineffectual, it’s hurting people in order to get attention.”
  • Texas Democratic gubernatorial nominee Beto O’Rourke to New York Times columnist Charles Blow on how the El Paso shooting illustrates the dangers of dehumanizing immigrants and creating “an ominous class” of people: “O’Rourke said that Abbott’s plan to bus immigrants to liberal cities was obviously an attempt to distract from his failure to shore up the state’s fragile electrical grids, prevent school violence and reduce inflation, but he also framed it as ‘an effort to incite fear and hatred and connect with people at a very base, emotional level,’ an ‘effort to dehumanize people,’ and that is precisely what it is. Abbott is not only trying to dehumanize immigrants, but to strip them of their individuality and create an ominous class. In that way, immigrants can be converted from throngs of individuals with individual lives, stories and feelings into an amorphous wave, overwhelming and unrelenting, crashing into the country.
  • Abbott is using these human beings as a weapon and a tool for the shallow purpose of retaining power. For O’Rourke, this is obscene. As he put it: ‘There is no way that I would ever, in a million years, resort to that kind of fear mongering and demagogy, and vilifying, demonizing people, because as an El Pasoan I saw exactly what that results in: Twenty-three of my neighbors were murdered in a matter of minutes there.’”
  • Governor Gavin Newsom (D-CA) at Texas Tribune festival: What does the migrant transport stunt say about the character of Ron DeSantis and “the Republican Party that celebrated that act of cruelty and dehumanization?” Also speaking at the Texas Tribune festival, Gov. Newsom stated of DeSantis’ stunt: “He came into another state, your state, to try and find pawns in a political game. Rounds them up. Sends them to an island. And then fundraises off it. What does that say about his character and the character of the Republican Party that celebrated that act of cruelty and dehumanization? … I find it offensive and disgraceful and increasingly normalized in the Republican Party.”
  • Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-TX) to MSNBC’s José Díaz-Balart: We are seeing, “the consequences of going it the Republican strategy, which is dealing with immigration only as a border issue … We can and should do more in regards to opening up legal pathways … The reason we are seeing the challenges that we’re seeing on the border is because we have, as a country, shut down or completely eliminated legal pathways. So when people don’t have legal pathways, we will see more irregular migration.”  Rep. Escobar also told The Hill: “ the Republicans always want to have it both ways. While they want to condemn Venezuela and say they support Venezuelans, the minute Venezuelans need help, they debase themselves in the way that they treat them.”