Morning Plum: Hillary pokes GOP’s hornet’s nest on immigration

By Greg Sargent May 5 at 9:20 AM

As your humble blogger has argued before, one of the under-appreciated stories of 2016 is that likely Dem nominee Hillary Clinton has already embraced much of President Obama’s agenda. With the GOP candidates all pledging, to varying degrees, to roll back whatever parts of that agenda are realized, and opposing elements of it that still hang in the balance, many basic contrasts for 2016 are in place.

Today Clinton will deepen that contrast on an issue that has potentially far-reaching demographic implications for the 2016 battle: Immigration. In remarks today at an event with DREAMers and immigration activists, Clinton will say:

Undocumented immigrants must have a chance for full citizenship under overhaul of the immigration system, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton will demand Tuesday.

“The standard for a true solution is nothing less than a full and equal path to citizenship,” Clinton’s campaign said in a preview of remarks she is expected to give during a visit to a largely Hispanic high school here.

“She will say that we cannot settle for proposals that provide hard-working people with merely a second-class status,” the campaign said.

A number of observers are pointing out that this aligns Clinton with the “left” side of the Democratic Party. This is not really right. In fact, the Democratic Party is more unified in favor of immigration reform than it has ever been, due in part to the increasing importance of Latinos to the party, and in keeping with the party’s broader shift on the priorities that matter to the emerging coalition that has driven Dem victories in recent national elections — nonwhites, millennials, and socially liberal college educated whites.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2015/05/05/morning-plum-hillary-pokes-gops-hornets-nest-on-immigration/?wpisrc=nl_popns&wpmm=1