Last week in Part 3 of this series, we looked at Donald Trump’s immigration reform proposals. This week, the focus will be on Hillary Clinton’s immigration stance.
As you may recall, the verdict on Trump’s immigration reform proposals was mixed. Some of his ideas were quite good – 1) his statement that American immigration policy should be set up to benefit all Americans and 2) his call to end birthright citizenship – can readily be reconciled with Biblical political theory. On the other hand, some of his ideas fell short of the mark – 1) Trump’s signature issue, his call to build a wall all along the US-Mexico border, and 2) his eVerify program, a proposal that would, in effect, create a national biometric ID card, requiring anyone looking to get a job to show “his papers” to prove he was eligible to work in the US.
An analysis of Hillary’s immigration plan will require a different approach than the one I used for Trump’s. Because her immigration proposals are so uniformly bad, realistically there is no way to break her ideas down into the categories of “good” and “bad” ideas.
In short, her immigration program is an unrelieved disaster that, if enacted, will go a long way to transforming the US into a third world country, while forcing ordinary Americans to foot the bill for the privilege. Or to put it another way, her immigration policy could well have been crafted by prelates of the Roman Church-State, whose destructive immigration policies she has largely adopted as her own. In fact, the only real difference between Mrs. Clinton’s ideas on immigration and those of Rome is that she doesn’t bother with trying to justify them, as the Romanists do, by twisting the Scriptures.
The following critique will be based upon Mrs. Clinton’s immigration platform as stated on her campaign website here.
A Nation of Immigrants
Mrs. Clinton’s begins her immigration platform with the following hypothetical argument: If we claim we are for family, then we have to pull together and resolve the outstanding issues around our broken immigration system.
To this I would ask the question, What do you mean by “resolve the outstanding issues around our broken immigration system? Both what issues Mrs. Clinton identifies and what her proposed solutions are will go a long way to determining whether this is a statement in the interest of American electorate or not.
In Mrs. Clinton’s case, you don’t have to wait long for the answer. She spells it out plainly by saying, “We can’t wait any longer for a path to full and equal citizenship.” In other words, if you are “for the family”, you must support amnesty for the 12 million plus individuals who are in the US contrary to US immigration law. And if you don’t support amnesty for all, you are, therefore, not “for the family.”
This, of course, is pure rubbish. In fact, it strikes this observer as exactly the opposite of the truth. Because I am for the family, my own, those of my fellow Americans, and also those of the aliens who have violated American immigration law, it is important not to reward illicit behavior, which is the ultimate effect of Mrs. Clinton’s proposal.
Hillary goes on to invoke that most tired of immigration bromides, calling America a “nation of immigrants” as another reason American’s should accept her proposals. But, as David Hume pointed out in the 18th century, you cannot get an ought from an is. It simply does not follow that because America is a nation of immigrants that, therefore, Americans ought to accept her amnesty proposal and the enormous costs, both economic and social, implied by it.
Immigration Reform in Her First 100 Days
Mrs. Clinton makes it quite clear that immigration reform is her top priority. As her website states, “Hillary will introduce comprehensive immigration reform with a pathway to full and equal citizenship within her first 100 days in office.”
But how many Americans actually know that this is the case. I’ll admit to not following every speech or press release by the current presidential candidates. Perhaps Mrs. Clinton intended to make this point somewhere along the way in one of her press conferences that she didn’t hold. Who knows? But I don’t recall hearing her make this point about the amnesty in the first 100 days anywhere in her public campaign statements.
There seems to be a certain lack of frankness here on her part. But then again, that sort of thing is her stock in trade.
The DAPA Heartbreak
“The Supreme Court’s deadlocked decision on DAPA was a heartbreaking reminder of how high the stakes are in this election,” says Hillary’s website.
So, you may be asking, what is DAPA anyway? Short for Deferred Action for Parents of Americans, DAPA, “is a planned American immigration policy to grant deferred action status to certain illegal immigrants who have lived in the United States since 2010 and have children who are either American citizens or lawful permanent residents” (Wikipedia).
To put in another way, DAPA is in effect a mini-amnesty, allowing the illegal alien parents of anchor babies to remain in the country indefinitely until such time as their children come of age to sponsor them for citizenship.
Anchor babies, as you may know, are children born on American soil to illegal alien parents. And due to the location of their birth, these children are automatically considered to be American citizens. DAPA allows their parents to avoid deportation and eventually be rewarded with citizenship when their children turn 18 and are able to act as their sponsors.
To date, DAPA has not been enacted due to it being blocked by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2016. This decision was upheld by the Supreme Court, which is the ruling Hillary called “heartbreaking.”
If DAPA is ever enacted, it will have the effect of rewarding illegal aliens twice. Once by allowing them to have anchor babies with automatic American citizenship and once by allowing those parents to remain in the country until their American born children are able to sponsor them for full citizenship.
Doubtless, most if not all families in the illegal alien community consider this a good deal. But what about the American families who have to pay the costs associated with this program? Is it a good deal for them? Certainly not. But in Hillary’s world, the well-being of foreigners comes before the well-being of the American people.
And this really gets to the heart of the problem many Americans have with the current immigration “debate,” which really is no debate at all. But rather consists of government officials announcing some new immigration program to the harm of ordinary Americans, and then proceeding to lecture them when they hesitate to swallow it.
The only “heartbreak” about DAPA is that the American people have been so asleep at the wheel as to allow the nation to degenerate to the point where legislation of this sort has come within a hair’s breadth of becoming law.
And hearkening back to my comments from last week, DAPA once again highlights the desperate need to plug the gaping legal hole of birthright citizenship. Without anchor babies, DAPA would be a non-issue.
Obamacare for Everyone
How’s that Obamacare working out for you? Not too well you say. Not to worry. Hillary’s got big plan’s to make everything better by allowing illegal aliens to sign up for this boondoggle and receive tax-payer subsidized healthcare.
Hillary’s website puts it this way, “We should let families – regardless of immigration status -buy into the Affordable Care Act exchanges. Families who want to purchase health insurance should be able to do so.”
According to the Washington Post, “Nearly half of the 17 insurance marketplaces set up by the states and the District under President Obama’s health law are struggling financially…Many of the online exchanges are wrestling with surging costs, especially for balky technology and expensive customer call centers.” So, we have a socialist healthcare system on the brink of failure and Hillary thinks adding millions more to the roles will help fix things. I guess it seems like a great idea to her great idea for the already rickety state health exchanges to continue to lose money on every sale but make it up on volume. Sounds like a good business plan to me.
If this legislation were to pass, not only would it serve to expand the welfare menu available to illegal aliens – at this time, those in the country illegally are prohibited from applying for welfare for themselves, they are, however, permitted to apply for welfare for their American born anchor baby children – it would serve as a first step to making available the full benefits of the welfare state directly to individuals who have violated American immigration law.
Unstated but important implications
As is often the case with those who promote big-government, Mrs. Clinton prefers to focus on the benefits of her immigration proposals, but has nothing to say about the costs. But it’s worth asking, Who’s going to pay for all this?
Nowhere in her immigration statements does Mrs. Clinton identify who will cough up the funds for all the goodies. But we all know that it will be the already hard-pressed American people.
And what about the future? What will happen once Mrs. Clinton gets her amnesty? Will that end once and for all the issue with illegal aliens? Of course not! Not only does Mrs. Clinton’s program not remove the perverse incentives of the welfare state, on the contrary it enhances them.
Is there any doubt that as soon as the current 12 million illegal aliens are amnestied that they will be replaced be a new cohort as large or larger? As they say, wash, rise, repeat. Hillary’s plan does nothing long-term to solve America’s gaping immigration problem, but serves only as a temporary band-aid with the promise of a bigger fix being needed in the future.
Hillary’s Monstrous Regiment
This has been an attempt to critique Hillary Clinton’s immigration program. In the view of this author, it is a disaster. But while it is necessary for Christians to point out her disastrous immigration plan, criticizing her ideas alone are not sufficient.
As I have pointed out elsewhere, it is unbiblical for Christians to support a woman for president. And it is important to say so. Were I to criticize only Mrs. Clinton’s policies, it might suggest to some that I think it’s appropriate to support and vote for female presidential candidates as long as their policy views are more Biblical.
As John Knox said so well, “To promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion, or empire above any realm, nation, or city, is repugnant to nature, contumelious to God, a think most contrary to his revealed will and approved ordinance, and finally it is the subversion of good order, and of all equity and justice (The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women).
Summary and Conclusion
The Bible tells us that the civil magistrate has two and only two functions: 1) punish evildoers and 2) praise the good. Hillary manages to invert this order by rewarding those who break the law while punishing those who keep it. To put it another way, Mrs. Clinton’s immigration program is basket of deplorable nonsense, one that calls good evil and evil good.
While Donald Trump’s immigration plan has significant flaws, at the same time it has a few points to recommend it. On the other hand, Mrs. Clinton’s immigration program is an unrelieved disaster, one that all by itself unfits her to assume any public office, let alone the presidency.
I realize this has been a rather harsh critique of Mrs. Clinton’s immigration proposals. It is well deserved and I stand by every word of it. But lest anyone suppose that I write these things without any Christian concern for the “strangers among us”, on the contrary, it is in part because I have concern for them that I write what I write.
While Mrs. Clinton’s immigration plan offers some short-term benefits to those who have violated American immigration law, long-term her proposals will damage their prospects as well.
Immigration should be a win-win for both the immigrants and for the American people. And when unjust, unbiblical laws benefit one group at the expense of another, in the long-run no one comes out ahead.
Or perhaps to put it more accurately, very few people come out ahead. For while Hillary’s socialist immigration policies work against the interests of the vast majority of people, both Americans and those who wish to come to this country legally, there are a few individuals who stand to benefit from her proposals: big government loving socialists, professional ethnic lobbyists, businesses that benefit from mass, taxpayer-subsidized immigration – legal and illegal – which allows to privatize outsized profits while socializing the costs, and globalists such as George Soros, Hillary Clinton, pope Francis and the entire Roman Church-State, all of whom seek to use mass immigration/migration as a battering ram to overthrow the Westphalian order of independent nation states established by the Protestant victory in the Thirty Years’ War and put in its place an oligarchic, New World Order global government.
It is possible to have an immigration policy that is fair both to the American people and to those who wish to come to this country. But for this to happen, we must seek God’s counsel in his Word. Lord willing, I will attempt to sketch out what a Biblical immigration policy should look like in future installments.
To be continued…
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I know. I know. I’m late with my Week In Review. I could tell you the dog ate my homework, but I don’t think that that would fly.
