Pro-Life and Pro-Immigration

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

One of the best pieces on the crisis of the immigrant children appears in the op-ed columns of Sunday’s New York Times. It plumps for pro-life groups to protest the Trump administration’s practice of “separating children from undocumented parents, even when the families are asking for asylum.” The author is Charles Camosy of Democrats for Life. His dispatch runs under the headline “You Can’t Be Pro-Life and Against Immigrant Children.”

It happens that The New York Sun has long favored a joint effort of the pro-life and pro-immigration movements. We marked this point in, among other editorials, our endorsement of Donald Trump for president. “We want,” we said, “a merger of the pro-immigration and pro-life movements, which understand the concept of human capital.” One could call it a combination of free market economics with the teachings of religious sages.

Mark, though, that the principle that Mr. Camosy formulates — that one can’t be pro-life and against immigrant children — has to be true in the obverse. It’s hard to be credible as a proponent of immigration, as so many Democrats posture as being, while also campaigning against, as the Democrats generally do, the pro-life agenda. Mr. Camosy’s formulation discomfits the Republicans, while the obverse discomfits the Democrats.

The Democrats’ problem was magnified during the 2016 campaign by Secretary Clinton, who included religious fundamentalists in her basket of deplorables. Hers is an offensive concept that, we noted in our endorsement of Mr. Trump, “belies her claim to a liberal spirit.” She cast “as bigotry views held by millions of Protestants, Catholics, Muslims, and Jews.” So while it’s nice to see Mr. Comosy’s piece in the Times, the question is left hanging.

The Times’ attempt to claim the high ground by exploiting the current crisis is — given the paper’s silence on the toll of Roe v. Wade — nauseating. It refuses to credit the decision of American voters in 2016 for more careful vetting of immigrants in light of the exigencies of the war on terror and narcotics on the southern border. The logic of such vetting itself grows more clear as the astounding Trump economic boom signals to the rest of the world that we are desperate for more labor.

This expansion, with plunging unemployment, is precisely what Lawrence Kudlow and other leading economists predicted would result from the Trump agenda. At one rally after another during the election, he appealed to optimism — a vision of what can be accomplished with a program of economic growth. We predicted it would “lead to a happier, more welcoming” America. That is where a combination of pro-life, pro-immigration policies will point.


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