Terry McAuliffe on Immigration

http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/blog/ ... mmigration

Terry McAuliffe on Immigration
February 6, 2007, 9:01 pm
Posted by Eduardo Peñalver

Here is Hillary's campaign chair (Terry McAuliffe) on NPR on immigration (HT Matt Stoller):


CALLER: I'm one of those Republicans who helped change the political arrangement by sitting on the sidelines, and if you want to get 10 percent of the Republicans, right now, to vote for Hillary Clinton -- and I would be one of them, and I've been a Republican for 40 years -- you do the following things. You eliminate your support for NAFTA, that was Bill Clinton. Eliminate your support for amnesty and wide-open borders -- Bill Clinton, I've heard him say it many times, and I believe I've heard Hillary say it also -- and you start getting self-deportation of the 20 million illegal aliens here that are taking the jobs, the wages, and the working conditions, and destroying them for working Americans, which I always thought Democrats supported.
TERRY MCAULIFFE: I couldn't agree more. We've got to shut these borders down. These people shouldn't be coming in this country. We need to enforce our border protections. We have to do something for the people who have been here for years and have paid taxes -- you know, we're for the people who have been in this country and paying taxes and raising their family. But for the people who have not been here, who have been here illegally and have taken advantage of the situation, we need to have a plan to get them back to the countries they came from, and more important, which is the first thing John talks about, we have gotta shut these borders down. I couldn't agree more.

... I don't care if you're a Democrat or a Republican, we all agree you've gotta shut the borders down. People who are coming into this nation taking our jobs.

Stoller notes that Clinton's campaign has disavowed these comments, but, frankly, I'm not satisfied. Doesn't this conversation perfectly capture what progressives just don't trust about Clinton and the people with whom she has chosen to surround herself? As illustrated by her stance(s) on Iraq, she's someone whose campaign appears to stand for nothing much beyond whatever it takes to get her elected. Confronted with a Republican immigrant-basher, McAuliffe's first instinct is to join right in. When folks on the left noticed, the campaign took it back, but often a person's first instinct tells us what is actually in his heart (in this case, not much). It would never have occurred to me to say what McAuliffe said, but that's because I actually believe it when I say, as he said in his retraction, that "I support comprehensive immigration reform that respects our nation’s immigrant heritage and provides an earned path to citizenship.”