When it comes to immigration policy, Hillary Clinton's had more career costume changes than her new BFF Katy Perry.
Last week, Clinton donned her militant, pro-illegal immigration mask and vowed to out-executive amnesty her old pals at the White House. “I will go as far as I can, even beyond President Obama,” she bragged, “to make sure law-abiding, decent, hardworking people in this country are not ripped away from their families.”
The millions of “law-abiding” people she's talking about legalizing, of course, are lawbreaking border crossers, visa overstayers, document fraudsters and deportation fugitives who chose on their own to rip their families apart.
Election-year conversions are nothing new. But Clinton's immigration path contains more switchbacks than a Colorado mountain road.
One season she's a bleeding-heart sympathizer. The next, she's channeling her inner Pat Buchanan with sound bites that would make a Donald Trump loyalist cheer. “A country that cannot control its borders is failing at one of its fundamental obligations,” she thundered many moons ago. “I am, you know, adamantly against illegal immigrants,” she asserted in 2003. But that was then. This is now.
After the horrific murder of San Francisco's Kate Steinle by a serial criminal alien who had been deported multiple times, Clinton disavowed sanctuary policies and stated she had “absolutely no support for a city” that looked the other way. Almost immediately, a campaign spokeswoman clarified that her boss believed sanctuary cities can “enhance public safety” and supported more amnesty (that is, more illegal immigration) to cure the bloody consequences of unfettered illegal immigration.
Before Clinton was for driver's licenses for aliens here illegally, she was sorta-kinda against them. Her slippery straddling evoked mockery among her Democrat presidential rivals in 2007, when she was asked during a debate whether she supported then-New York Democrat Gov. Eliot Sptizer's licensing scheme.
“Well, what Gov. Spitzer is trying to do is fill the vacuum left by the failure of this administration to bring about comprehensive immigration reform,” she babbled. After former Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., unequivocally stated that “a license is a privilege and that ought not to be extended” to lawbreakers, she protested that “she did not say that it should be done, but I certainly recognize what Gov. Spitzer is trying to do.”
Cynical birds of a feather flip-flop together. In 2006, both President Obama and Clinton voted for the Secure Fence Act, which in theory mandated construction of a 700-mile barrier along the southern border. Barely two years later, both Democrat presidential rivals renounced their support after Texas special interests complained about the inconvenience to the “community” and open-border activists whined about onerous passport requirements.
“You know where I stand” on immigration, Clinton is telling voters. But she doesn't stand so much as she slithers from one expedient position to another and back in order to mollify Big Business and identity politics racketeers. Rest assured: The one role she'll never play convincingly is that of truth-telling defender of “law-abiding, decent, hardworking” citizens who believe in putting American sovereignty and American interests first.
Michelle Malkin is the author of “Who Built That: Awe-Inspiring Stories of American Tinkerpreneurs.”
