You can find videos of pretty much every prominent Democrat talking about how illegal immigration is bad for the country, and vowing to combat it. This discussion by Bernie Sanders from 2015–not that long ago–is as good an exposition as I have seen. He says illegal immigration is a right-wing plot to bring down wages:
America first!
Academic work has confirmed the negative impact of illegal immigration on working-class wages. Sanders was right about the economics, if not about the right-wing plot. The obvious question is, what happened? Why did the Democratic Party turn on a dime, and become the champion of illegal immigration? Was it a deliberate strategy to import future Democratic voters, as some argue? Did they have a good-faith change of heart, based on new information that came to their attention? Or, when Donald Trump made illegal immigration the centerpiece of his 2016 campaign, did Democrats reflexively take the opposing view?
I don’t know. But it is remarkable to see the change from just a few years ago, when every prominent Democrat was inveighing against illegal immigration, to the Biden administration, where admitting 10 million or more illegals became one of the government’s top priorities.
