At the news conference last week, Pelosi attempted to criticize Governor Ron DeSantis's (R) "Martha's Vineyard stunt" while echoing the Democratic talking point of America's need for comprehensive immigration reform.
"We have a shortage of workers in our country," the House speaker said. "And you see even in Florida, some of the farmers and the growers saying, 'Why are you shipping these immigrants up north? We need them to pick the crops down here.'"
Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), notices that Pelosi said quiet part out loud: Democrats will not secure the border because it would interfere with importing an entirely new working class who will work for less money and fewer protections. That is what "comprehensive immigration reform" is code for.
"She certainly stereotyped the migrants in a very unflattering way, assuming that everybody who's coming across the border really wants to pick crops in the hot Florida sun," he notes. "This is a typical reaction from the detached elitists who live in places like San Francisco and work in Washington, D.C."
Border officials in the U.S. have arrested more than two million illegal immigrants in the past 11 months at the southern border — a record high driven by a hike in migration from Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua, according to figures released by Customs and Border Protection.
Mehlman says elites like Pelosi do not feel the impact of that invasion.
"I really doesn't affect them in any significant way, until, obviously, they wind up on Martha's Vineyard," he submits. "But it does affect the lives of working people everywhere across the country. The people coming across the border are not going to be competing with Paul Pelosi for his livelihood, but they're going to be competing with a lot of other people."
As for Pelosi's comments, FAIR invites people to "imagine the reaction if Trump said the same exact thing."
