After losing a stunning presidential election to a former reality TV star, Democrats decided to doubled-down on their antics, painting Republicans as racist, anti-immigrant xenophobes. But this narrative just received a massive blow: legal immigrants are ardently opposing sanctuary city policies.
Unless the Left can somehow paint such immigrants as anti-immigrant racists, they might need to change their narrative. (Then again, I wouldn’t put anything past the delusional Left that thought trotting out Lena Dunham as a Hillary Clinton surrogate in 2016 was a good idea.)
A surprising report from The New York Times uncovered the movement of legal immigrants pushing back against sanctuary city bills in Maryland:
When lawmakers in Howard County, Md., a stretch of suburbia between Washington and Baltimore, declared their intention to make the county a sanctuary for people living in the country illegally, J. D. Ma thought back to how hard he had worked studying English as a boy in Shanghai.
Stanley Salazar, a native of El Salvador, worried that the violent crime already plaguing Maryland’s suburbs attributed to immigrant gangs would eventually touch his own daughters.
Hongling Zhou, who had been a student in Beijing during the Tiananmen Square uprising, feared an influx of undocumented immigrants, and their children, would cripple the public schools.
In the Democrat-dominated county where one in five residents is foreign-born, a proposal to make the county a sanctuary for illegals was vehemently opposed by legal immigrants, much to the Times’ disbelief.
“In passionate testimony before county legislators, and in tense debates with liberal neighbors born in the United States, legal immigrants argued that offering sanctuary to people who came to the country illegally devalued their own past struggles to gain citizenship,” notes the Times.
Some such legal immigrants “even felt it threatened their hard-won hold on the American dream.”
The Times continues:
Their objections stunned Democratic supporters of sanctuary here and helped bring about the bill’s demise in March. A similar proposal for the state collapsed this month in the Maryland Senate, where Democrats also hold a two-to-one advantage. Some of the same immigrants spoke out against it.
The is not news to people on the right side of the aisle. How many of us have family members, neighbors, friends, who are law-abiding legal immigrants who are against laws which protect criminal illegals? Of course sanctuary city bills are opposed by a majority of American citizens, including many legal immigrants.
Here are the numbers from Daily Wire’s Aaron Bandler from February:
The Hill reports that a Harvard-Harris online survey from February 11-13 found that 80% of Americans believe that cities should be forced to hand over illegals to the federal government when they commit crimes.
The poll also found that 52% support President Donald Trump’s executive orders that de-fund sanctuary cities, start building the wall and add 10,000 more immigration officers.
Moreover, 53% of those polled supported Trump’s temporary travel ban from seven Muslim-majority countries.
“The failure of the sanctuary bills in Maryland reveals a potentially troublesome fissure for Democrats as they rush to defy Mr. Trump.”
The New York Times
The Times, finally catching on to the dismal support for sanctuary cities, even from immigrants, issued a quasi-warning to Democrats:
The failure of the sanctuary bills in Maryland reveals a potentially troublesome fissure for Democrats as they rush to defy Mr. Trump. Their party has staked out an activist position built around protecting undocumented immigrants. But it is one that has alienated many who might have been expected to support it.
To read the Times’ compelling profiles on four different legal immigrants from Maryland against sanctuary city policy, click here.