OPINION:
The right to vote is both a right and a privilege, bought by sacrifice to be enjoyed by every American citizen. But the outcome of the 2016 presidential election could be affected — either directly or indirectly — by those who are not citizens. Americans who think their homeland is slipping away from them can thank the liberal Democrats (and alas, there are few of any other kind left in the party) for taking it away from them. When donkeys kick up their hindquarters, they break everything in sight.
Hillary Clinton wants to win most of the nation’s 27.3 million Hispanic voters, and fair enough. Hispanics lean Democratic; 71 percent of them voted for Barack Obama over Mitt Romney four years ago. But here’s the unsavory surprise: She’s trying to enlist illegal immigrants to pull it off. Her campaign announced an initiative to use “Dreamers,” young people brought into the country unlawfully by their illegal parents, to man a nationwide voter registration drive called “My Dream, Your Vote.” The drive targets Hispanic voters.
The Dreamers number in the millions and are a natural Democratic demographic — the product of the progressive relaxing of immigration policies over a generation to subsume the nation’s heritage with a dizzying infusion of ethnicities. President Obama granted some 700,000 of them temporary legal status in 2012, but courts leading up to and including the Supreme Court ruled that he didn’t have the constitutional authority to legalize 11 million illegal immigrants with the stroke of his pen.
Nevertheless, Mrs. Clinton sees nothing wrong with putting the young Dreamers to work with her to lock up the nation’s largest ethnic group. The reward for their efforts: She promises to restore the stalled effort to enact amnesty for illegal immigrants. Her website promises that “Hillary will introduce comprehensive immigration reform with a pathway to full and equal citizenship within her first 100 days in office.”
Politics, like billiards, is a game of calculating angles. The Clinton campaign must reckon it has more to gain by sending young illegals into neighborhoods with voter registration forms than it will lose from the sorry spectacle of employing those who live outside the law to encourage others to outvote legally registered Republicans and independents.
Americans who feel like strangers in their own land could have another Election Day worry: noncitizens who manage to cast ballots themselves. A survey in the December 2014 issue of Electoral Studies magazine reported that in 2008 and 2010, more than 14 percent of noncitizens queried were registered to vote.
Researchers calculate that in 2008, 6.4 percent of the noncitizens actually voted and in 2010, 2.2 percent actually cast a ballot. Excluding legal permanent residents, who are ineligible to vote, those proportions of illegal immigrants could total between an estimated 250,000 to 750,000 votes nationwide. Compared to an estimated 226 million citizens eligible to cast a ballot on Nov. 8, those numbers are small, but it’s instructive to recall that George W. Bush’s margin of victory in the 2000 contested Florida recount was 537 votes.
Neither Hillary nor Donald Trump need apologize for looking under every nook and cranny to find the legal votes necessary to win the White House. Donald Trump will, with equal zeal and cleverness, beat the bushes in search of votes. But Hillary’s rallying to illegals to work the angles for her simply smells bad, like so much of everything she does. It’s not supposed to be the American way.
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