As admirers of the late Robert F. Kennedy Sr. reflect on the former U.S. attorney general and Democratic senator from New York in the year of what would have been his 100th birthday on Nov. 20, one growing point of agreement is that RFK was no traditional liberal.
One stance in particular on which Kennedy might well have been on common ground with today’s conservatives is illegal immigration.
In response to a question from Newsmax on Monday at a forum of the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., panelist and AEI scholar Richard Kahlenberg agreed that Kennedy would definitely have been a strong opponent of illegal immigration.
Recalling how then-Attorney General Kennedy testified before Congress in the early 1960s about revising national quotas for immigration to the U.S. because they had a “racial impact,” Kahlenberg noted that “he made a point in testifying that he was not talking about increasing levels of immigration overall and was for law enforcement.”
Asked by Newsmax specifically whether that meant RFK would have opposed illegal immigration like close friend and United Farm Workers leader César Chávez, Kahlenberg replied: “My sense is he would agree with Chavez on that question.”
Chávez, who campaigned with RFK in the 1968 Democratic presidential primary in California, was a vigorous opponent of what he called “illegal workers” and felt strongly they undermined legitimate farmworkers.
“We estimate that 60-70% of the farmworkers in California — of the resident workers — are out of the job because of the wetbacks,” Chávez, using a derogatory term, told the magazine LaPaz in 1974, charging that the government deliberately left immigration checkpoints “unmanned” so that undocumented immigrants could undermine labor strikes and take jobs from UFW union members.
The AEI forum featured five authorities on Kennedy, including his daughter, former Maryland Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, who agreed that her father was, as a new AEI publication puts it, a “liberal patriot.”
Kahlenberg, Townsend, and other panelists generally agreed Kennedy was in no way a progressive in the contemporary sense of the word. Indeed, he disagreed with many in the Democratic Party of 1968 in terms of liberal positions.
Among other positions on which Kennedy parted company with many liberals of his time was his strong emphasis on law and order (a phrase he used frequently), that welfare was demeaning and destructive to those it intended to help, and racial preferences, quotas, and affirmative action were not helpful to Blacks and other minorities.
John Gizzi is chief political columnist and White House correspondent for Newsmax. For more of his reports, Click Here Now.
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