Comment by rayiner
5 years ago
That’s fair. My point wasn’t to really assert a conclusion about the Democratic Party as a whole, but rather to show that there is a robust social left in the US. To my knowledge, only two Western countries extend universal (rather than emergency) care for undocumented immigrants.
The broad US support for this is at least in large part as a response to the enormous levels of undocumented immigrants present as a result of what is widely seen (across the political spectrum, though for different reasons) as an incredible failure of the US immigration system. You can’t meaningdully assess position on an ideological spectrum based on comparing preferred policy responses without considering the differences in the objective circumstances to which the policy responses are directed.
There isn't broad support for this as a policy. Everyone knows about this issue because it's one of the least popular potential Democratic policies, with a strong majority in opposition, which is why Biden doesn't support it.
> There isn't broad support for this as a policy.
Feel free to read it as “as broad as it is”, different polling from around the same time toward the end of when it was an active issue varied widely (I can find different polls from about the same time putting it at 30% and 11% support), and the exact breath of support isn't really relevant to my point.
>To my knowledge, only two Western countries extend universal (rather than emergency) care for undocumented immigrants.
Not to derail, but extending public health care to undocumented immigrants in a pandemic just makes sense. Undocumented doesn't mean vaccinated, so there's a clear public interest in minimizing the absolute number of COVID-19 carriers, no matter their legal status.