Most are familiar with Bernie’s opposition to Ted Kennedy’s immigration bill. But Bernie also voted in favor of an amendment in support of the anti-Latino, anti-immigrant, racist Minutemen.
The defense is that the amendment meant nothing as a practical matter. That means Bernie voted in favor an amendment that symbolically supported the Minutemen. Not such a great defense. Here is the article in question:
Mr. Sanders’ Minutemen vote was more perplexing. Regarded as heroes by some conservatives and racist thugs by Democrats in border states, the private militia claimed American officials were tipping off the Mexican government about the whereabouts of their patrols. The militia found a sympathetic ear in some quarters of Congress, where Republican Jack Kingston of Georgia introduced an amendment barring the Department of Homeland Security from providing “a foreign government information relating to the activities of an organized volunteer civilian action group, operating in the State of California, Texas, New Mexico, or Arizona.”
The amendment sailed through Congress with the help of the GOP and some conservative Democrats—and Mr. Sanders, who in theory had no reason to weigh in because he represented a state nowhere near the Mexican border.
observer.com/...
Julian Castro and Rep. Gutierrez were very critical of Bernie. They said Bernie was not there when they needed him. And if Bernie were trying to make some kind of comment on privacy, he did so in a context that would not help privacy and would symbolically boost the Minutemen and hurt Latinos.
Bernie appears at his core to be against immigration because it will cause lower wage workers, in his view, to compete with American workers. It is a fundamentally GOP view of immigration.