OPINION:
Illegals first, Americans second — that’s the mantra of the current White House.
On Saturday, President Biden did an interview with MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart in which he defended his State of the Union address and apologized for his off-the-cuff remark calling the man charged with killing Georgia nursing student Laken Riley an “illegal.”
“I shouldn’t have used ’illegal.’ It is ’undocumented,’” Mr. Biden said.
But it was Mr. Biden’s next words that were most telling of his open border policy.
“I’m not going to treat any of these [illegal aliens] with disrespect,” Mr. Biden said. “Look, they built the country, the reason our economy’s growing.”
And in that regard, Mr. Biden is correct.
On Thursday night, Mr. Biden highlighted his economic record, boasting that his administration has created 15 million jobs, adding back jobs lost in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic and more. That’s good news — except when you examine to whom the jobs are going.
“Relative to right before the pandemic, we know that there are about 2.8 million more people working right now than there were right before the pandemic,” former Trump White House economist Kevin Hassett told Fox News on March 9.
Then Mr. Hassett added a huge caveat to those numbers: There are actually 200,000 or so fewer U.S.-born people working than before the pandemic.
“So it looks like all the job creation in the Biden administration relative to pre-pandemic is probably illegal aliens, and I don’t think that that’s something [Mr. Biden is] really going to want to crow about,” Mr. Hassett said.
Yet Mr. Biden is crowing, and it’s all part of a greater strategy to diminish the influence of U.S. citizens in favor of illegal immigrants — a political base the Democratic Party believes it can use to gain, consolidate and retain power.
Just last week, every single Democratic senator voted against a proposal that would have prohibited illegal aliens from being counted in the U.S. Census, which determines the number of congressional seats and Electoral College votes each state gets.
The amendment was added to a $460 billion spending bill and introduced by Republican Sen. Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, who issued a statement slamming the move.
“Democrats’ unanimous opposition to this commonsense measure confirms that they’re using illegal aliens and sanctuary cities to increase their political power,” Mr. Hagerty said. “With this vote, Senate Democrats chose to trample on the rights of each American’s voice.”
Already, the Biden administration has let 7.2 million people enter the country illegally (that number does not include the “gotaways,” meaning the actual number of illegals is much higher). Even the lower number is greater than the population of 36 states.
The Senate vote caught the attention of billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, who commented on his social media platform X that “increasing illegals boosts Dem voting power, causing them to recruit even more!”
He continued: “If Dems win president, House & Senate (with enough seats to overcome filibuster), they’ll grant citizenship to all illegals & America will become a permanent one-party deep socialist state.”
Democrats have already taken steps toward enfranchising the illegal alien population.
In more than a dozen municipalities nationwide, including the liberal bastions of San Francisco, Oakland, California, and the District of Columbia, noncitizens are allowed to vote in local elections.
New York City recently tried to allow “lawful permanent residents” to vote but was blocked by a state court. Across the country, leftist cities and counties are adding ballot measures to allow “undocumented residents” to vote in local elections.
This week, Mississippi’s secretary of state sent a letter to Mr. Biden’s Justice Department, asking it to stop enforcing an executive measure he believes is being used to register ineligible convicts and illegal immigrants to vote in state and federal elections.
The executive order was signed by Mr. Biden in 2021 and instructed federal agencies to “consider ways to expand citizens’ opportunities to register to vote and to obtain information about, and participate in, the electoral process.”
Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson wrote in his letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland that this effort has forced the U.S. Marshals Service to “modify agreements with jails” despite state law.
These modifications compel the Marshals Service “to provide voter registration materials and facilitate voting by mail,” which creates numerous opportunities for ineligible prisoners, including illegal aliens, to be registered to vote.
Mr. Watson told Fox News Digital, however, that the federal program “provides prisoners with misleading information concerning their right to both register and vote in Mississippi — a right which they may not have.”
But it’s all part of the Democrats’ open borders plan. If you listen closely enough, they’ll tell you.
• Kelly Sadler is the commentary editor at The Washington Times.
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