Patterico's Pontifications

11/17/2014

Is Obama-Style Immigration “Reform” Popular with Rank-and-File Progressives?

Filed under: 2014 Election,General — JVW @ 1:43 pm



[guest post by JVW]

In the avalanche of news that came from the elections results on November 4, it was easy to overlook many smaller races that yielded interesting results. Progressives, who otherwise got metaphorically smacked in the mouth in the election, like to point to successful minimum wage hikes passed by initiative in several states as well as the defeat of personhood amendments championed by pro-lifers in two states (though a third state, Tennessee, voted for an amendment asserting there exists no right to abortion or taxpayer funding for abortion services). Writers at left-wing organizations such as Mother Jones, Slate, and the New York Times have used those results to suggest that the results of the election were a reaction to Obama Administration’s executive and bureaucratic difficulties and not a rejection of progressive principles, which they believe remain on the ascendancy.

But not all went swimmingly for the Vast Progressive Consensus on election night. It initially escaped notice outside of a narrow slice of the Pacific Northwest, but voters in blue, blue Oregon voted by a two-to-one margin to prohibit driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants in the very same election in which they overwhelmingly voted to reelect their Democrat governor, their Democrat U.S. Senator, and their Democrat U.S. Representatives (four of the five seats, each of which was won by no less than a 14% margin).

For some reason, this news hit the Internet over the past weekend with several outlets running this story. I found out about in the print version of my local newspaper this morning, with a brief blurb about the vote. It’s even being spun as a warning to President Obama that elite progressive opinion on what the administration likes to call immigration reform doesn’t necessarily filter all the way down to the rank-and-file Democrat voter. Now Oregon is but one data point among the blue states, but it’s looking more and more to me that this whole charade is being driven largely by activists in three big states, California, Illinois, and New York, with garden-variety media and academia lefties who live in the other 54 47 states obediently parroting the party line, with dissenting voices within the Democrat party having been shamed into silence. The President and his court eunuchs would do well to ponder the notion that there is a groundswell of popular resentment that their arrogance and isolation allows them to overlook. And the “immigration activists” who are so skilled at dominating media coverage might consider that perhaps their demands are too far ahead of public opinion on this issue.

– JVW

15 Responses to “Is Obama-Style Immigration “Reform” Popular with Rank-and-File Progressives?”

  1. “with dissenting voices within the Democrat party having been shamed into silence.”

    sentient shaming?

    Colonel Haiku (2601c0)

  2. A prediction: He will issue his executive order on immigration on the day the grand jury verdict is reported in Missouri and the riots start. It will give the MFM a choice on what to report. He is not interested in what the American people in general –or even the rank and file of his own party– think about anything, anymore.

    elissa (586885)

  3. He will issue his executive order on immigration on the day the grand jury verdict is reported in Missouri and the riots start.

    Dear African-American community:

    No, we aren’t going to indict the police officer in Ferguson. Oh, and we’re bringing in a whole bunch of people to take the remaining low-skill jobs left in your communities.

    Love,
    Barack and The Man

    P.S. — Thanks for the votes. BHO

    JVW (60ca93)

  4. You bet it is! We welcome all of hispanic friends to america. President Obama should act to day! They will help flush the evil republiscum down the los banos!

    rank and file progressive (5a8a4e)

  5. Buh-bye, Perry

    JD (285732)

  6. Odd you call Republicans “evil” when it’s the demoncraps who just can’t stop lying to America. There’s a special corner in hell reserved for you pathological Obama followers.

    Hoagie (4dfb34)

  7. doesn’t necessarily filter all the way down to the rank-and-file Democrat voter.

    Wagers it never filtered down to the rank-and-file Democrat voter. The notion that you cannot enforce the law and should not try (or that it’s vulgar to try) has been for a generation or two a prejudice of the overclass (or ‘articulate people’ as Thomas Sowell designates them) who secrete themselves in better neighborhoods. The notion that ordinary working-class people need to be leavened and displaced by ‘entrepreneurial’ immigrants is local to people who are not working class (see Bush, Jeb). The notion that manufacturing a multilingual society is kewel is local to the same sort of haut bourgeois pest. There’s been one change in a generation. Ca. 1992, Barbara Jordan and Coretta Scott King were hustling for the interests of working class blacks; their successors are so tied up with their games played with other purveyors of identity politics that they’re selling their constituency down the river.

    Again, as always, the posited welfare benefits from immigration are meagre and the distributional effects thereof are regressive. These people want mass immigration for the same reason that Peter Hitchens’ cronies did in Britain ca. 1971: they do not much care for ordinary Americans (“bitter clingers”) and want them to have less influence in the society in which they live (or, in the case of the Chamber of Commerce types, they do not care much about ordinary Americans and want cheaper labor).

    Art Deco (ee8de5)

  8. moar wetbacks means lower wages for them, so every progressive will be able to hire a maid or a nanny to take care of the house & kids while they go out and protest in favor of raising the minimum wage.

    redc1c4 (b340a6)

  9. The public prosecutor has told Gov. Nixon what the grand jury decided, hence the summons to the National Guard and the erection of a unified command.

    Art Deco (ee8de5)

  10. Riots, Amnesty
    vs
    Govt. Shutdown

    mg (31009b)

  11. i wasn’t aware they needed to be recruited…

    there is a surfeit of morons about these days, more than enough to have one or more perry, etc, for every conservative blog, web site or social media page.

    hell,look how many we have here.

    redc1c4 (4db2c8)

  12. if the grand jury came back with anything other than “no bill”, based upon the publicly available information, it would have been obvious that they were railroading an innocent man to appease a mob.

    redc1c4 (4db2c8)

  13. if the grand jury came back with anything other than “no bill”, based upon the publicly available information, it would have been obvious that they were railroading an innocent man to appease a mob.

    I do not know that it’s all that clear. What amazes me is the characters you encounter in these sort of discussions. You get people whose experience of police work and military life approximates that of Madonna Ciccone yapping on about what an incompetent Ofc. Wilson must be and proposing that they know better than accumulated practice what the rules of engagement ought to be in these situations. Compare the mild-mannered and unpretentious combat veteran, George McGovern to (say) Bradford deLong. Liberal discourse has decayed into rants by arrested-development cases.

    Art Deco (ee8de5)

  14. Dear rankandfileprogressive-
    I believe the Spanish term is “los inodoros”.

    Also- I’m assuming you inadvertently left off the final “/s”.

    ¿Si?

    A_Nonny_Mouse (cbb639)


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