Maryland’s Governor, His Eye on a 2016 Presidential Bid, Goes All-In for Immigration

This article was last updated on April 16, 2022

Canada: Oye! Times readers Get FREE $30 to spend on Amazon, Walmart…
USA: Oye! Times readers Get FREE $30 to spend on Amazon, Walmart…

El Tiempo Latino, the Spanish-language weekly owned by the Washington Post, was so impressed by a recent speech by Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley that it ran a story about it twice in its September 19 issue.

There it was on the front page, under the banner headline that translates as “Solidarity with children immigrants”. And there it was on page 6, under the headline: “O’Malley asks attorneys to help migrant kids”. For some reason, both times the story itself was published in English.

I also liked some of the pronouncements of the Maryland governor, who is trying to position himself as an alternative to Hillary Clinton in the race for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination: “I support the Dream Act and an increase in the minimum wage.”

But while I identify as a liberal, I’m a moderate liberal. So to me the governor’s enthusiasm for immigration was so over the top in his speech to the Hispanic National Bar Association that it smacked of pandering.

O’Malley’s two-part theme is common among the most ardent advocates of immigration. They believe both that immigration is such an undiluted good that more can only be better and that those who seek to regulate legal immigration or stop illegal immigration are wrongheaded and mean-spirited.

“We recognize that there are always those in every generation and every time of our history’s evolution … who don’t always welcome new immigrants with open arms,” O’Malley said. “Scapegoating is not something new, especially in times of economic austerity.”

O’Malley is all-in for immigration, no questions asked, and all criticism reduced to scapegoating. He makes no distinction between those who enter the country through the established legal processes, that issue about one million green cards each year, and those who cross the border illegally or overstay their temporary visas.

His vision is unconstrained by any principle of restraint or legality, or any notion that our immigration laws should protect American workers, establish an orderly and coherent system, and exercise the sovereign right to control our borders in the national interest.

“We believe that all do better when we’re all doing better,” said O’Malley. He apparently thinks “all” refers not just to those who have staked a legal claim to full membership in American civic life, but anybody who finds a way to get across the border. The national interest must give way to his cosmopolitan effusions.

In his speech, O’Malley quoted a friend, who wrote “Ecologists and biologists know that systems achieve stability and health through diversity, not uniformity. Ideologues take the opposite view.”

There is much to be said for diversity, to be sure. Moreover, O’Malley, who claims to be a committed defender of the Chesapeake Bay against pollution, ignores the warnings of environmentalists like Tom Horton that the population growth and development that would follow comprehensive immigration reform’s opening of the gates would overwhelm ongoing efforts to save the bay.

To O’Malley, such unpleasantries are mere churlishness, harshing his mellow and complicating his effort to position himself to the left of Hillary Clinton.

O’Malley waxed poetic as he called for attorneys to represent the legal interests of Central American immigrants — including many children — who have recently flooded to the border to seek refugee status. He has said that to send them home would be to condemn them to violence at the hands of criminal gangs. He ignores the fact that many — probably most — have come north to flee poverty, not violence.

Said O’Malley: “When unaccompanied children fleeing violence in Central America arrive on our doorstep, it is not only for their good, but for our good, and the good of the nation that our children will share with them, that we should act hospitably, and revere the human dignity and the courage that those children possess and have demonstrated in risking great dangers to come here.”

These are beautiful words and fine sentiments. But while they speak one noble truth, they ignore others that are less pleasant, but equally deserving of acknowledgement by anyone who seeks to lead a democratic nation, especially one whose own people — citizens and immigrants — are facing struggles that bring them into competition with those for whom O’Malley expresses such limitless enthusiasm.

Click HERE to read more