Politics is a dirty game where partisans are incentivized to be as uncharitable about the other side as possible.
Case in point: Here I am on a regular Monday morning when I received an email from the congressional campaign of San Diego County Supervisor Jim Desmond in which he “Calls Out Levin’s Border Security Hypocrisy: ‘Too Little, Too Late.’”
I normally ignore congressional campaign emails, mainly because it’s way too early to be caring about the next election.
But this one caught my attention because, as an opinion page editor, I’ve interviewed Levin and have published several commentaries of his about border security and immigration and have found him to be appropriately thoughtful and nuanced about the issue.
“Where was Mike Levin when smuggling incidents surged by 139% between 2020 and 2024?” said Desmond in the email. “There was a broad daylight boat landing in Carlsbad — right in his own backyard — and he said nothing. Now that the politics have shifted, he’s finally pretending to care.”
Is this true? Has Levin really said nothing and is he only now pretending to care?
About five second of Googling shows that Levin, about this time last year, responded to a boat landing in Carlsbad by calling for a vote on legislation to extend the enforcement zone off the coast.
“Recent incidents of unidentified vessels landing onshore in our district have underscored the urgency of bringing H.R. 529 to the House floor for a vote. This bill would double the range in which Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents can operate to address migrants and other vessels arriving by water along our coast,” the Levin statement said at the time.
The bill did go up for a vote, he voted for it and it ed. So, there’s that.
What about the idea that Levin’s concern about immigration is just a sudden phenomenon?
Well, Levin also sponsored legislation like the Dignity Act in 2023 to boost border patrol funding, boost border security, require employers to the immigration status of workers and establish a path to permanent residence status for some undocumented immigrants. Though it didn’t get anywhere, it was genuine bipartisan legislation that balanced the need for order in the immigration system with comion.
So, no, it doesn’t seem like Levin is just suddenly “pretending to care.”
This year, Levin even voted for the Laken Riley Act, putting him in the minority of his party and putting him in line with the Republicans and presumably even Desmond.
Incidentally, I actually disagreed with Levin on this bill, because the bill is actually quite sloppy and draconian.
As David Bier of the Cato Institute warned, “the LRA is a sloppy bill. The LRA’s first section requires the detention of any noncitizen without status charged with or arrested for shoplifting or another theft offense. Anyone convicted of those offenses is already subject to mandatory detention. But an arrest isn’t a conviction, and the LRA would require the federal government to take custody of people the police have cleared.”
Yet Levin voted for it and is still being slammed for “a desperate attempt to save face after years of silence and failed leadership.”
As I said, politics is a dirty game.
Taken together, the idea that Levin is uniformly soft on illegal immigration is just not true. Levin, like most people, recognizes the need for a compromise here. There is room for reasonable disagreement about exactly how to balance all the competing interests at stake, but Levin seems pretty much in the middle.
There are plenty of issues on which I think Levin can be readily criticized, but this isn’t it.
Sal Rodriguez can be reached at [email protected]
