Democrats aren’t very good at learning lessons. But there are some things even they can figure out.
One lesson that seems to have sunk in for most of the party’s elected officials is that its insane immigration positions were a giant self-inflicted wound that sank them at the polls in 2024.
It’s one thing to be a moderate on immigration. There’s a case for more legal immigration, including highly skilled scientists, hard-working laborers and dissidents from tyrannical enemy regimes.
There’s a case for legalizing “Dreamers” who were not responsible for coming here illegally, or who have served our country in uniform.
There’s a case for humane treatment of illegal immigrants, and a case for keeping birthright citizenship.
Democrats could have made those cases the past four years.
Instead, they opened the floodgates, overwhelmed the asylum system, helped illegal criminals evade local law enforcement, released migrants into the country without making them show for long-delayed court dates, bankrupted cities straining to house, feed and clothe penniless arrivals, and generally acted as if the rights of Americans had to give way to the rights of illegal migrants.
Even voters in New York City and New Jersey rebelled in unprecedented numbers.
Few of the actions of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were more indefensible or suicidal. They were in retreat by 2024, with nobody even trying anymore to defend their previous policies.
When something is unsustainable, eventually, it will end. It ended when Donald Trump got elected again and Republicans took control of the Senate.
The Laken Riley case became a symbol of the illegal-immigration madness and a rallying cry for rolling it back.
Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student, was murdered while jogging in Athens, Ga. in February 2024. Her killer, José Antonio Ibarra, was an illegal alien from Venezuela.
Caught by the Border Patrol in Texas in September 2022, Ibarra was released into the country and put up at the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan at New York taxpayer expense before heading to Georgia.
At one point after another in both states, Ibarra was arrested for crimes ranging from moving violations and “acting in a manner to injure a child under 17” to shoplifting — but he kept skipping out. No jurisdiction held him in custody.
That left him free to kill Riley.
Even Bill Clinton, who still has more political sense than most Democrats, admitted in October, “If they’d all been properly vetted that probably wouldn’t have happened.”
Better vetting at the border might have helped — Ibarra and his brother were suspected of involvement with Venezuelan gangs.
But so would locking up, as soon as the cops arrested him, a guy who wasn’t legally in the country in the first place.
In order to put a stop to that revolving door, Republicans introduced the Laken Riley Act last year.
It requires federal agents to detain illegal immigrants suspected of committing even non-violent crimes. It also gives state attorneys general more power to sue to make the Department of Homeland Security do its job.
In March, the House passed the bill with the support of 37 Democrats, but the Democratic Senate under Chuck Schumer’s leadership killed it.
It was sponsored in the Senate by Montana’s then-endangered Democratic Sen. Jon Tester — but he’d also voted for Schumer, and voters punished him accordingly.
Times, and the Senate, have changed.
On Tuesday, 48 House Democrats joined Republicans to pass the Laken Riley Act once again.
New supporters included Ritchie Torres of The Bronx, upstate Democrat Joseph Morelle, and two southern Democrats from majority-black districts, Lucy McBath of Georgia and Terri Sewell of Alabama.
On Thursday, the bill sailed past a potential Democratic filibuster by a lopsided 84-9 vote in the Senate.
The “no” votes came only from senators from Hawaii, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Vermont, Minnesota and Oregon.
Even Schumer, who smothered the bill last year, and his deputy Dick Durbin voted yes.
Seven of the 11 Democratic senators up for re-election in 2026 voted to advance the bill, including Jon Ossoff of Georgia, Gary Peters of Michigan, Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, Mark Warner of Virginia, John Hickenlooper of Colorado and Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico.
Along with Ossoff and Peters, seven other Democratic senators from states carried by Trump in 2024 voted to open debate.
Every Hispanic senator voted yes. Ruben Gallego, the newly elected progressive from Arizona, even co-sponsored the bill, which is set for a final vote on Monday.
Cory Booker and Andy Kim of New Jersey both have some explaining to do in opposing it.
Don’t expect the Democrats to change their spots across the board.
They’ve backed so many bad ideas for so long, they can’t walk away from them all.
But they know that open borders and get-out-of-jail-free cards for illegal immigrant criminals are dead losers at the polls.
You can tell by how they are voting now.
Dan McLaughlin is a senior writer at National Review.
