Cooke: There’s No Way around It — Democrats Are Useless Hypocrites on Immigration

National Review Online

Friday, August 11, 2023

 

On The Editors podcast on Friday, NR senior editor Charles C. W. Cooke blasted Democratic New York City mayor Eric Adams who suddenly sounds like the immigration hawks now that illegal immigrants are burdening his city.

 

“This is a side of progressivism that I loathe,” he said. “It is hypocritical, and it illustrates the capacity of the professional progressive mind to move between diametrically opposed hyperboles without any loss of enthusiasm.”

 

“These people,” he continued, “go from, ‘Have you seen the Statue of Liberty? Have you read the poem on it?’ They go from crying at the border. They go from spreading lies about border agents. They go from lionizing Ellis Island to proposing that the influx of a few thousand of the people that, until yesterday, they were suggesting could fit quite happily into tiny border towns in Texas, is going to strain the social fabric to such an extent that it represents a crisis. And there’s nothing in the middle. There’s no acknowledgement that they’ve changed their mind. There’s no slow transition from one to the other. They just turn on a dime, as if overnight they had downloaded the latest patch to their software.”

 

Cooke observed immigration policy comes down to how many immigrants with what characteristics come to the country, and then what happens when they do. Noting that he was in favor of legal migration, he proposed that the system is “broken”; that, at some point, there will need to be bipartisan reform; and that Republicans can also be counter-productive on this issue.

 

“But from what I can see,” he said, “progressives in this country have nothing to add to that discussion. We’ve got no change in the national discourse. We’ve got no change in national policy. What we have done by bussing immigrants north, which I think is salutary, is demonstrate some hypocrisy and perhaps add to, as progressives might say, the ‘lived experiences’ of people in big cities in the Northeast when it comes to illegal immigration. But these people are useless, I’m afraid.”

 

“They are useless.”