Slotkin: 'Republicans are fomenting anti-immigrant hate as a policy'

Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) said in a new interview with The New York Times that “Republicans are fomenting anti-immigrant hate as a policy,” while Democrats remain scared to take a firm stance on the issue.

“Most Americans understand that we need immigrants to grow and for our economy to survive. They just want them to come here through legal, vetted channels. Congress could fix that problem,” Slotkin told the Times in an interview published Thursday.

“The Republicans are fomenting anti-immigrant hate as a policy and a strategy, and Democrats are so scared of offending either immigration groups or people to the left of them — maybe they’re in a primary,” she added.

“They are concerned about saying: ‘No, not everyone gets to be here. Not everyone has the right to live in the United States, and we, like every other country in the world, get to know who and what is coming across our borders.’”

"That kind of clamping down with rules tends to make a lot of my Democratic colleagues really nervous," she said.

President Trump’s approval rating on immigration has dipped to 41 percent, the lowest since he came back to the White House, per a new survey. In the Reuters/Ipsos poll, about half of the respondents said they did not approve of how the president has carried out his expansive immigration crackdown.

The Trump administration’s actions on immigration have also sparked intense backlash from the left, with protests popping up against immigration sweeps and Democrats in Congress seeking to shed light on Immigration and Customs Enforcement tactics and conditions of immigrant detention centers.

Slotkin said Democrats need to be cautious about letting certain advocacy groups shape their strategy toward Latino voters.

“There’s been a lot of ink spilled about advocacy groups that don’t seem to represent a lot of voters,” Slotkin said in her Times interview. “We saw that in real time in this last election, when no one had a bigger swing toward Trump than Latinos. Some of these groups were trotting around Washington saying they represent the immigrant community, and they clearly did not.”