Throughout the 2016 election, both candidates have painted their own picture of what America looks like. On one hand, Donald Trump’s America is in danger, and he’s the hero that will restore safety and order. On the other, Hillary Clinton’s America is one of beautiful diversity and endless potential, mostly thanks to the Obama administration’s last four years of work.
Clinton and Trump have now spent months solidifying the images of their respective Americas in the minds of voters. On a policy level, immigration has been a key idea in creating these two distinct pictures of our country. But, as a recent Politico Magazine research effort shows, the two candidates have incorrectly construed their own immigration stories to fit the immigration rhetorics in their campaigns. And in doing so, they’ve thrown one thing to the wayside: the true solution to the immigration problem.
Let’s look at Hillary Clinton’s illustration of this problem.
Why Clinton’s Story Doesn’t Add Up:
As a nation built on immigrants, America will always welcome immigrants.
This is the most basic idea of Hillary’s immigration rhetoric. Clinton touts the deep immigrant background in her own family, invoking her grandfather from England several times during her campaign.
As Politico discovered, some of Hillary’s first ancestors living in the U.S. began to blame the influx of immigrants for their own job displacements. Working in the mines, Clinton’s great uncles did experience the opportunity associated with the American Dream. However, industrialization and technological advancement led to increased competition in the coal industry, and Hillary’s Rodham ancestors began to suffer from the consequences of outsourced labor, and America began to see its first serious debates on immigration.
The underlying issue in the immigration problems of past and present: “economic fundamentals.” Although Clinton invokes her immigrant-working family, she fails to include in her current immigration rhetoric the most basic problem that hindered her ancestors’ American Dream – the way to address immigration is with economic fixes. Clinton has led those Americans wary of her immigration policies to feel inherently un-American because of their doubts. Really, her rhetoric should incorporate more of an economic background to fully tell the immigration story she has frequently used in her own rhetoric.
Clinton spends an ample amount of time downplaying the immigration fears that her opponent has based his campaign on. Perhaps, an economical approach to Clinton would align better with the ancestry that she often calls into play to further her “stronger together” narrative.
Check out this video for a more detailed account of Clinton’s ancestry and its immigration story.