Obama’s New Stance on Immigration

Former President Barack Obama recently visited Johannesburg in South Africa to deliver a speech in honor of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Nelson Mandela.

The speech included thinly-veiled criticisms of his own party, which has taken a hard turn towards socialism since his departure from the White House, and some surprising comments on border security.

“It’s not wrong to insist that national borders matter, [that] whether you’re a citizen or not is going to matter to a government, that laws need to be followed,” said Obama, adding that “newcomers should make an effort to adapt to the language and customs of their new home.”

Like it or not, the Obama Administration actually broke records on deportation. As of 2015, more than 2.5 million illegals had been sent home since Obama took office in 2009. To compare, just over 2 million people were deported during the two terms of President George W. Bush.

Obama’s advice on immigration comes amid an intense debate over border security and sanctuary cities. On one side you have a president calling to build a wall between the US and Mexico; on the other side you have Democratic Socialists calling to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The real solution lies somewhere in between, but to get there we have to work together.

Democracy only works when both sides are willing to “engage with people not only who look different but who hold different views,” said Obama. This has been a major problem during the Trump era, when people regularly end friendships over political differences.

We should attempt to “get inside the reality of people who are different than us,” continued Obama, “and you can’t do this if you just out of hand disregard what your opponents have to say from the start. And you can’t do it if you insist that those who aren’t like you – because they’re white or because they’re male – that somehow there’s no way they can understand what I’m feeling, that somehow they lack standing to speak on certain matters.”

These words might seem strange coming from a president who made overt racial appeals during his campaigns and embraced radical movements like Black Lives Matter, but you know what they say about hindsight. Obama seems to understand better than most Democrats that simply calling President Trump a racist pig isn’t the best strategy for winning control of Congress in the fall.

Before he ran for president, Obama urged Americans not to think in terms of “red or blue,” “left or right,” or “conservative or liberal.” Obama campaigned as a unifier and then ruled as a leftist ideologue. And while his presidency certainly contributed to the racial and ideological schisms we see today, there is still a place for that original call for unification.

Another thing Obama understands better than most is that his party needs to win back the blue-collar whites who voted for him twice and then hopped the fence to vote for Trump in 2016. And they aren’t going to do that by embracing extreme policy ideas like single-payer healthcare, universal basic income, free college tuition, and drug legalization.

Democracy is crafted on the expectation of compromise, and without that, we get a war between two sides that solves nothing.

As Obama himself explained in 2016 to the graduating class at Howard University:

“You need allies in a democracy. That’s just the way it is. It can be frustrating and it can be slow. But history teaches us that the alternative to democracy is always worse. That’s not just true in this country. It’s not a black or white thing. Go to any country where the give and take of democracy has been repealed by one-party rule, and I will show you a country that does not work,” said Obama.

“And democracy requires compromise, even when you are 100 percent right. This is hard to explain sometimes. You can be completely right, and you still are going to have to engage folks who disagree with you. If you think that the only way forward is to be as uncompromising as possible, you will feel good about yourself, you will enjoy a certain moral purity, but you’re not going to get what you want. And if you don’t get what you want long enough, you will eventually think the whole system is rigged. And that will lead to more cynicism, and less participation, and a downward spiral of more injustice and more anger and more despair. And that’s never been the source of our progress. That’s how we cheat ourselves of progress.”

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