House Speaker John Boehner does not understand that immigration reform is a way for Democrats to change the electorate, according to conservative commentator Mark Steyn.
Reacting to House Majority Leader John Boehner’s recent mockery of his Republican colleagues’ intransigence on immigration reform, Steyn argued that Boehner is missing what everyone else can see.
“Essentially, that’s what’s going on here,” he said Thursday evening on The Hugh Hewitt Show. “The Democratic Party is importing voters. And John Boehner doesn’t get that.”
Speaking before the Middletown Rotary Club in Ohio, Thursday, Boehner ribbed his Republican colleagues for staying away from comprehensive immigration reform.
“Here’s the attitude. Ohhhh. Don’t make me do this. Ohhhh. This is too hard,” Boehner mocked, according to The Cincinnati Enquirer.
“We get elected to make choices,” he continued. “We get elected to solve problems and it’s remarkable to me how many of my colleagues just don’t want to … They’ll take the path of least resistance.”
Steyn retorted, on Hewitt’s show, that it is actually the Republican base who do not want the kind of immigration Washington, D.C. is looking to sell.
“The problem here isn’t his representatives and the members of his caucus. The problem here is the Republican base. The problem here is in fact the American base, who throughout the country have to live with the hard consequences of vast, illegal, low-skilled, transformative immigration, which has all kinds of implications for school budgets and hospital emergency rooms,” he said. “And unless life has been as good to you as it has been to John Boehner and to the political class, you’re at the sharp end of what for the political class in this country is mainly a problem of pool boys and the nice ladies who leave the chocolate on the bed in your hotel room in the evening.”
Steyn went on to praise Canada’s system of immigration which, he said, serves to attract entrepreneurs.
“Canada has an immigration policy that attracts, makes it easy for entrepreneurs and people to come into Canada, and they’re the kind of people who when they get there, they want to run their own businesses,” he said. “And they’re interested in conservative policies from the get-go. That is not the case with what has happened to U.S. immigration.”