Bernie Has to Do Better Than This

On a Sunday in early April, your favorite grumpy Jewish uncle and mine, Bernie Sanders, opened himself up to a renewed line of attack from those within the Democratic Party (and on the political left more broadly) who feel he is out of touch with issues of race and identity. At a public appearance in Oskaloosa, Ia., a member of the audience asked him about the logistics of so-called open borders, apparently under the mistaken belief that Sanders supported an open borders policy.

The candidate quickly corrected his questioner. “I do not think that’s something we can do,” he said. Instead, Sanders favors “comprehensive immigration reform.” As to open borders, he continued, the world is too full of extreme poverty, implying the United States could not afford to open its doors to the global poor.

It was inelegantly put and poorly framed, although as a matter of policy, it’s not necessarily different from any of the other major candidates’ in the ever-growing Democratic presidential field. Many of the hopefuls have remained deliberately vague on the issue, preferring high-flown rhetoric that focuses on Donald Trump’s stupid wall (which Beto O’Rourke, for example, said he’d tear down), on the gratuitous cruelty of family separation and on the plight of the “Dreamers,” who were brought into the U.S. as young children, and whose condition is therefore considered more sympathetic because they did not willfully violate any American laws.

What, precisely, the candidates would do about immigration—and by “immigration,” our discourse means almost exclusively the immigration of black and brown people from the broadly defined “global south”—remains unanswered. Most, like Sanders, seem generally to support some kind of reform to mitigate the worst inhumanities of the current administration and to provide relief to certain classes of apparently more deserving immigrants, while still leaving much of the architecture of existing American immigration policy in place.

“I think,”