Hillary: I'll give legal status to any illegal immigrant who wants it, so long as they bring a child with them

That’s Conn Carroll’s formulation of what she said yesterday, which reads like it must be an exaggeration for effect. It really isn’t. Obama’s mega-amnesty last November gave legal status to illegals who are parents of U.S. citizens. Hillary’s now promising to expand that by giving legal status to parents of DREAMers — who are themselves illegal immigrants. If kids brought here illegally by their parents qualify for legalization under Obama’s DACA amnesty and the parents of those kids qualify for legalization under President Hillary’s amnesty, then presumably any foreign citizen with a kid has a golden ticket to stay so long as they can make it across the border with their child. And since Hillary’s also strongly in favor of a path to citizenship for illegals who are already here, her trump card next year in out-pandering the GOP with Latino voters, it’s also presumably true that a mom and kid who’ve made it across will eventually become (Democratic) voters in due time. Makes me wonder how the next Democratic presidential nominee, in 2020 or 2024, will try to out-pander Obama and Clinton. The only move left is to offer legal status to all adult illegals, whether or not they have a kid. Open borders, just like those hysterical anti-amnesty nuts on the right always feared.

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Oh, by the way: Obama declined to offer legal status to the parents of DREAMers last year because — wait for it — his lawyers told him he couldn’t lawfully do that. Hillary’s pitch to Latinos, in other words, is that she’ll be even more aggressive in taking a dump on separation of powers than President Overreach is.

Clinton said she’d differ from Obama by interpreting existing law to permit other groups, including the parents of DREAMers, to apply for protected status under the banner of “sympathetic cases.”…

The president last year explained to disappointed immigrant families that he did not extend deportation waivers to all parents of DREAMers because administration legal experts told him he did not have that authority…

“It was a legal constraint on our authority,” Obama told a town-hall gathering in Tennessee in December. “It was not because we did not care about those parents. And I know that there are a lot of DREAM Act kids who are concerned that their parents may still not qualify.”…

“The challenge we had — in the minds of the Office of Legal Counsel — was we’ve already exempted the young people through DACA. And then you boot-strap off of that — the capacity to exempt their parents as well — you’re not rooted originally in either somebody who is a citizen or a legal permanent resident,” Obama said.

No mention of border security or E-Verify from her yesterday, notes Byron York. Which is funny, because even for someone who’s “evolved” opportunistically on various issues over time to get right with the left, Hillary’s journey on immigration has been a loooooong one. Via Jeff Dunetz:

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In a February 2003 interview that went unreported except by NewsMax, Clinton told WABC Radio’s John Gambling, “I am, you know, adamantly against illegal immigrants.”…

“People have to stop employing illegal immigrants,” she told WABC. “I mean, come up to Westchester, go to Suffolk and Nassau counties, stand on the street corners in Brooklyn or the Bronx [and] you’re going to see loads of people waiting to get picked up to go do yard work and construction work and domestic work.”

From “people have to stop employing illegal immigrants” to “come on in, and bring your kids!” But it’s the Republican Party that’s gotten more extreme on this issue, right? That would be the same Republican Party, mind you, whose presidential field this year almost uniformly agrees with the position on immigration taken by — ta da — Hillary Clinton in 2008. Makes me wonder if what you’re about to watch won’t be the GOP party line circa 2024.

Here she is yesterday in Nevada. Nothing says passion and sincerity about a cause like reading notes at what’s supposed to be a roundtable discussion.

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