Hillary: The Third World Has a “Right” to Move to the United States

On Monday, Donald Trump gave a speech on terrorism and immigration in which he said:

We want people to come into our country, but they have to come in legally, through a process…. No one has a right to immigrate to this country.

That should be a truism. But, as Byron York points out, Hillary Clinton responded in a retweet that she disagrees:

In a sensible world, Hillary’s apparent belief that foreigners have a “right” to emigrate to the United States would disqualify her from the presidency. In the first place, she is simply wrong as a legal matter. In United States ex rel. Knauff v. Shaughnessy, 338 U.S. 537 (1950), the U.S. Supreme Court wrote:

At the outset we wish to point out that an alien who seeks admission to this country may not do so under any claim of right. Admission of aliens to the United States is a privilege granted by the sovereign United States Government. Such privilege is granted to an alien only upon such terms as the United States shall prescribe.

The ability to control who enters a country is a fundamental attribute of sovereignty. It is appalling that Mrs. Clinton fails to understand this basic fact.

As a practical matter, a pure open borders policy, as implied by the claim that foreigners have a “right to immigrate to this country,” would be a disaster. Of the world’s 7.4 billion people, at least three billion would be infinitely better off if they were living in the U.S. How many of those three billion–a conservative estimate–is Hillary prepared to accommodate? We already have the world’s third-largest population, trailing only China and India. The volume of immigration is already higher than at any previous time in American history. Hillary Clinton, with her vast wealth and phalanx of armed guards, may be insulated from the consequences of unprecedented immigration, both legal and illegal. But the rest of us are not.

It would be a disaster to elect this woman president.

Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.

Responses