In Bill Clinton's 1995 State of the Union address, he said all Americans were disturbed by the number of illegal immigrants in the country.  He noted the burdens they put on the taxpayers before vowing to crack down aggressively.  A partial quote is:

That's why our administration has moved to aggressively secure our borders more, by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as every before, by cracking down on illegal hiring, by barring welfare benefits to illegal aliens[.]

Clinton received a standing ovation for his remarks.

There were few protests, if any.  The media, Hollywood, and Democrats were not outraged at Clinton.  Meryl Streep did not say the brownshirts were coming.  Madonna didn't threaten to burn the White House down. The Washington Post and other newspapers did not write articles every day calling Clinton a racist, a xenophobe, and a breaker of families.

Since then, there's a very different tone.  California's speaker of the House recently said the following (this is a partial quote in context):

I can tell you half of my family would be eligible for deportation under executive order, because if they got a false Social Security card, if they got a false identification, if they got a false driver's license, if they got a false green card, and anyone who has family members who are undocumented knows that almost entirely everybody has secured some sort of false identification. That's what you need to survive, to work.

Forgery and identity theft are serious crimes, yet somehow not for illegal immigrants.

Does anyone believe that people who use false identification to stay and work in the U.S. won't vote illegally?

President Obama and the Democratic Party intentionally made the illegal immigration problem worse by refusing to enforce the laws.  They knowingly refused to address immigration problems when they had complete control of Congress and the White House in 2009 and 2010.  In doing that, they showed that they wanted to create a political issue rather than actually solve the problem.  President Obama sued Arizona for seeking to enforce immigration law, saying it is a federal issue, and then did nothing about either that or sanctuary cities.  After that, he and his Democratic Party blamed Republicans and conservatives as the flow of illegal immigration only got worse.

Obama, the media, Democrats, and Hollywood are disingenuous at best.

Democracy is in danger not because a president enforces immigration laws.  Nor is it in danger because Congress passes bills that include building a wall, which, by the way, Obama, then-senator Hillary Clinton, and Vice President Joe Biden voted for.  Yet somehow, democracy is in extreme danger when the blowback comes after politicians and the Department of Justice refuse to abide by their oaths to enforce immigration laws, and judges ignore congressional statutes when they write rulings?

Jack Hellner is a writer in Springfield, Illinois.