Authored by Robby Starbuck via the OC Register (emphasis ours),

There is no clearer and more shameful example of betrayal in modern American politics than Big City Democrats who support foreigners over their own citizens.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti speaks during the LA Memorial Coliseum reopening celebration, August 15, 2019. (Photo/Gus Ruelas)

“Democrat lawmakers care more about illegal aliens than they care about their own constituents,” President Trump said at his recent rally in Cincinnati, reiterating the point he made earlier when he criticized Democrat Representative Elijah Cummings for complaining about conditions at the border while ignoring the terrible plight of his own constituents in inner-city Baltimore.

Liberal media types will dismiss the President’s latest remark as “racism,” like always, but that only means that they’re either too obtuse or too blinded by partisan rage to recognize that Donald Trump is really just sounding the alarm about a crisis that has been allowed to fester for decades by Democrat public officials who are too busy chasing national headlines to pay attention to the problems in their own backyards.

The phenomena the President described are very real — the poor, mostly black residents of many Baltimore neighborhoods have been forced to put up with levels of violence and squalor that would turn the stomachs of white, liberal suburbanites. Instead of facing that reality and demanding change, those left wing suburbanites just ignore it.

It’s not just Baltimore. The irony of today’s Democrats is that they espouse values claiming to care for minority communities, but in reality the low-income communities they represent are mostly populated by minorities who have had their economic interests betrayed at every turn by the Democratic Party’s dedication to fighting for open border policies.

Study after study has shown that native-born black men are the group that suffers most from mass, low-skilled immigration. The fact is that black people, particularly black men, on average have less education and fewer specialized skills than native-born Americans as a whole. This isn’t simply a function of something wrong in their community; this is the result of something wrong with the leadership in their communities.

One study from leading economists at Harvard University, the University of Chicago, and the University of California-San Diego even found that immigration hurt the economic prospects of African American men even more than the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s and ‘90s.

Conversely, when the strong immigration enforcement measures that President Trump advocates — and that Democrats continuously seek to obstruct — are actually implemented, black and Hispanic families in urban poverty are the first to benefit. In 2017, for example, a Chicagoland bakery was forced to stop employing hundreds of illegal alien workers, but it didn’t go out of business. The owners were merely forced to give those jobs to Americans, between 80 and 90 percent of whom were black Americans.

Perhaps the most important fact that gets lost in the liberal rush to yell “racist” is just how new this obsession with open borders is among the elected officials representing America’s inner-cities.

When the sanctuary city movement got started more than 30 years ago, it wasn’t in downtown Baltimore or Philadelphia. The impetus did not come from black Democrats or people of color. Rather, it began with liberal white lawyers in rural Oregon filing lawsuits against immigration enforcement and liberal, mostly-white city officials in San Francisco and Berkeley, California and St. Paul, Minnesota passing the first major “sanctuary” resolutions.

As recently as the 1990s, Rep. Barbara Jordan, a civil rights leader and former congresswoman representing inner-city Houston, represented the prevailing liberal view on illegal immigration. Appointed by President Bill Clinton to lead a landmark commission to study the problem of illegal immigration, Jordan’s report was a scathing condemnation of the policies of non-enforcement then coming into vogue with white liberals, leading her to tell The Washington Post in 1994 that “any nation worth its salt must control its borders.”

In particular, Jordan made a point of highlighting the particular harm that illegal immigration does to the economic well-being of poor and low-skilled Americans.

“The commission finds no national interest in continuing to import lesser-skilled and unskilled workers to compete in the most vulnerable parts of our labor force,” Jordan explained in 1995. “Many American workers do not have adequate job prospects. We should make their task easier to find employment, not harder.”

The open borders rhetoric coming from the Democratic Party today fails to represent the economic interests of black Americans. It is a reflection of mostly white, bleeding heart liberal priorities — bolstered by corporate America’s desire for cheaper labor — and it has co-opted the voices of black Americans, whose votes the Democratic Party takes for granted.

I was proud to see President Trump call out this sad state of affairs. While some complain about HOW he starts the conversation, he’s the only one forcing the media to talk about these issues. While some may recoil at the tone he takes, it undeniably forces us to confront the issues America has ignored for too long.

I, personally, have had enough. No longer could my wife and I pay enormous state tax bills that we knew weren’t benefiting communities that deserved it. We couldn’t in good faith stay to see our tax dollars fund universal free healthcare for illegal immigrants while homeless veterans rot on the streets, and we couldn’t continue to watch the state education system turn schools into indoctrination centers for the Democratic Party agenda… So we left.

Despite growing up in California and working in Hollywood, we had enough of it. Like so many in California, New York, Illinois, and other blue states, we moved to a red state. Most citizens in the inner-cities don’t have the luxury of leaving like we did, though.

Instead, the only way their communities will improve is by disrupting the status quo. What’s that old saying? “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result.” If you hit your head against the wall a hundred times it’s going to keep hurting. If those communities keep voting for the Democratic Party, their communities will continue to hurt, too.

It’s far past time to lift up our inner-cities, reduce the gap in quality education for kids born into those communities, and give those kids genuine opportunities to grow up into shining examples of the American dream. I only wish more in the liberal media took what President Trump said seriously, instead of reflexively adding to the chorus of baseless “racism” accusations that do nothing to improve the lives of inner-city Americans.

If you live in a city that has been failed by Democrats, I challenge you to ask yourself some simple questions: How long have Democrats controlled my city? What have they done to fix the problems we’re facing? What have they done to help our young people achieve a more prosperous life than their parents? What have they done to reduce violence and homicide?

If you answer those questions honestly, you’ll come to realize that you really have nothing to lose — but a lot to gain — by voting Republican in 2020.

Robby Starbuck is a Cuban-American producer and director.