The Sanders campaign is considering numerous executive orders the Vermont senator would sign if elected president later in the year, according to a campaign document obtained by the Washington Post. Some of the executive orders reflect the radical change in views of the Democratic socialist on the issue of immigration.
(Via the Washington Post)
Aides have presented Sanders with a list of possible executive actions, including more than a dozen options for reversing President Trump’s immigration policy, such as lifting the cap on the number of refugees accepted into the United States and immediately halting border wall construction. Another option is the reinstatement of an Obama-era program that granted legal status to undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children.
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"As we continue discussing the early work of your presidency and the progress we can make, below for review is a brief overview of executive actions you could take early in your administration," the document states. "We cannot accept delays from Congress on some of the most pressing issues, especially those like immigration where Trump has governed with racism and for his own corrupt benefit."
But when Sanders joined the Senate in 2007, he opposed the comprehensive immigration reform bill pushed by former Sens. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and John McCain (R-AZ). Sanders said at a press event in 2007, "I believe we have very serious immigration problems in this country. I think, as you've heard today, sanctions against employers who employ illegal immigrants is virtually nonexistent. Our borders is very porous."
"Unfortunately," Sander said at a separate press event, "the guest worker provisions in this bill, which will bring many hundreds of thousands of low wage workers into this country will only make a bad situation even worse, will drive down wages even further, not only for low-wage American workers but for highly-skilled professions as well."
As late as 2015, Sen. Sanders opposed the idea of open-borders, calling it a "Koch brothers' proposal" that hurts poor people in the United States. His comments were made during an interview with liberal-leaning Vox Media.
"Open borders?" Sanders began, "Now that's a Koch brothers' proposal."
"Really?" the shocked journalist responded.
"I mean that's a right-wing proposal which says essentially there is no United States," Sanders argued.
"But it would make a lot of the global poor richer, wouldn't it?" asked the interviewer.
"And it would make everyone in American poorer," Sanders quipped. "Then you're doing away with the concept of the nation state, and I don't think there's any country in the world which believes in that. If you believe in a nation state or in a country called the United States -- or U.K., or Denmark or any other country -- you have an obligation in my view to do everything we can to help poor people. What right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people to work for two or three dollars an hour, that would be great for them. I don't believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country. I think we have to do everything that we can to create the millions of jobs. You know what youth unemployment in the United States of America is today? If you're a white kid high school graduate, 33 percent. Hispanic, 36 percent. African-American, 51 percent. You think we should open the borders and bring in a lot of low-wage workers, or do you think maybe we should try to get jobs for those kids? So I think from a moral responsibility we've got to do work with the rest of the industrialized world to address the issues of international poverty, but you don't do that by making the people in this country even poorer."
But now that Sanders is running in the Democratic primary, he's forced to adopt the insane policies supported by the Democratic Party. As the party has re-positioned itself as the anti-Trump party, it's now opposed to restricting immigration into the United States, placing the interests of foreigners over the interests of Americans.
