Between President Donald Trump’s saying immigration reform should be a “bill of love” to his declaration that saving Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) is “dead” thanks to Democrats refusing to seriously negotiate (and not because of his crack about having immigrants from “shit-hole countries”), Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-Whitey World) once again was rejecting any attempts to make DACA part of federal law.
“If we legalize the status of 850,000 young people who are here illegally, we can expect tens of millions of young people throughout the world to notice that,” bellowed The Mouth That Rohrabachered on World Net Daily (WND) Radio last week. “If they would like the government benefits of health care and education that come from legally being in the United States, there is no reason for me to believe this won’t obliterate our chances of getting control of our border.”
Hear Rohrabacher’s interview or read the excerpt here.
At that time, there still appeared to be good-faith efforts between the White House and members of Congress from both parties to create a pathway to citizenship for people who were brought to the U.S. illegally when they were children. The DACA protections end in March, which is obviously fine with a certain Surf Shitty congressman.
“We’re talking about millions of people here who will be brought into this country, and there’s no way we can build a wall high enough or dig a ditch deep enough to stop it after we’ve given them a treasure house of medical care and education,” Rohrabacher told WND. “We are going to undo any good we can possibly do otherwise.”
Even when the immigration-reform negotiations seemed to be going well—as in both sides were at least talking cordially with each other—the rub was Democrats wanting action on DACA first before moving on to allowable legal immigration, the U.S. labor market’s future worker needs and especially border security including, yes, the Great Wall of Trump.
Republicans fear Democrats would get their way with DACA, then walk away from the table when it comes to the thornier issues. Rohrabacher, who for decades opposed any legislation that would remove the prefix “illegal” from “immigrant,” makes it clear to WND Radio that DACA is a non-starter to him: “The only thing I would have a stomach for if DACA comes first is if it’s defeated.”
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.